OpenAI New Policy Ideas for the Intelligence Age Grants

OpenAI has awarded grants to 14 independent organizations to develop policy frameworks and prototypes that promote economic opportunity and societal resilience as AI capabilities advance. This initiative follows a commitment made in April 2026 to support external testing and expansion of the ideas proposed in OpenAI's Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.

Broadening Economic Opportunity through AI

OpenAI is funding several projects aimed at ensuring the economic benefits of AI are widely distributed and that labor markets remain resilient. These initiatives focus on productivity distribution, ownership models, and fiscal policy:

Labor and Workforce Adaptation

American Enterprise Institute (AEI): Developing low-, moderate-, and high-disruption scenarios for AI's impact on employment and skills, linking these indicators to specific policy playbooks.
Progressive Policy Institute (PPI): Designing a person-based benefits system for retirement, health, and education that includes "livelihood insurance" triggered by occupational shifts.
Windfall Trust: Scaling a global network of working groups across the US, UK, Canada, EU, and Latin America to analyze fiscal and labor-market questions under various AI scenarios.

Distribution of Wealth and Ownership

Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS): Benchmarking the EU against the US to examine how AI productivity gains are distributed across sectors and regions to develop a renewed European social investment model.
European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE): Creating a practical framework for a "Right to AI," exploring models such as citizen investment, social wealth funds, and employee ownership to increase productive asset ownership.

Fiscal and Infrastructure Policy

Tax Foundation: Analyzing how AI adoption shifts the balance between labor income, corporate profits, and capital gains to assess taxation options for fiscal resilience.
Abundance Institute: Comparing US state-level strategies for expanding energy generation and transmission to meet data center demand while ensuring local benefits.

Specialized Sector Applications

Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA): Studying the infrastructure and governance needed for research institutions in Brazil to translate AI access into scientific progress.
Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo (HCFMUSP): Evaluating an AI-enabled clinical information prototype for Brazil's Unified Health System (SUS) to improve clinician workflows and patient navigation while maintaining human oversight.

Strengthening Societal Resilience and Safety

A second group of projects focuses on the technical and institutional guardrails necessary to manage the risks associated with advanced AI systems:

Technical Safety and Coordination

Institute for Security and Technology (IST): Establishing a measurement and coordination framework for recursively self-improving (RSI) AI systems, including incident taxonomies and escalation criteria for industry-government coordination.
Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI | bio): Testing the legal feasibility and designing an architecture for the secure international sharing of information regarding AIxBio risks and mitigations.

Governance and National Security

Council on Strategic Risks (CSR): Developing a frontier-AI safety module and lab immersion program to build institutional capacity for national security professionals regarding oversight and human control.
Yonsei University: Testing AI methods to assess the quality of legislative oversight in South Korea's National Assembly to improve democratic accountability.

Policy Simulation and Privacy

Nanyang Technological University (NTU): Developing a privacy-preserving AI-agent framework to simulate household responses to government transfers and industrial policies using financial transaction data.

Implementation and Timeline

OpenAI is providing a total of $1 million in funding and up to $1 million in API credits to the selected projects. These initiatives span the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea. The projects will run for six months, with results expected to be reported in 2027.