OpenAI has granted funding to 14 projects led by independent organizations to investigate how AI can broaden economic opportunity and strengthen societal resilience as capabilities advance. The awards follow up on a commitment made in OpenAI’s April 2026 paper Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age to support outside groups testing, challenging, and building on the ideas presented there.
Why the work is needed
OpenAI notes that AI is rapidly increasing in capability and could transform learning, creativity, and economic participation. ChatGPT is used by about 1 billion people worldwide across geographies, income levels, and demographic groups, covering every major age cohort. But broad access alone does not determine whether AI serves many rather than a few; that outcome depends on societal choices about deployment and distribution of benefits. OpenAI argues that policy responses must be as ambitious as the technological change and that new approaches—rather than only adjustments to existing policy—are required.
The role of independent research
OpenAI says these decisions should not be left to technology companies alone. In democracies, policies should be shaped through public debate and democratic institutions. Independent research and policy organizations can develop and test new approaches, challenge assumptions (including OpenAI’s), and act as laboratories for ideas that governments can adapt to local circumstances.
Application process, funding and timeline
More than 400 people and organizations responded to OpenAI’s call for proposals. The selected projects will share a total of $1 million in cash and up to $1 million in API credits. The projects span the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea. Each project will run for six months, and results are expected to be reported in 2027.
Summaries of the selected projects
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American Enterprise Institute: AEI–Urban Bipartisan Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the American Workforce. The commission will develop low-, moderate-, and high-disruption scenarios for AI’s effects on employment and skills, and link observable disruption indicators to policy playbooks.
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Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS): Sharing the AI Dividend. CEPS will study how AI-driven productivity gains are distributed across workers, firms, sectors, regions, and countries in Europe and benchmark the EU against the United States. The project will produce a policy study, visualizations, and a stakeholder validation workshop.
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European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE): From Labour to Productive Ownership. ECIPE will examine how broader access to AI and ownership of productive assets could enable economic participation, and will develop a practical framework for a “Right to AI” while comparing models such as employee ownership, citizen investment, pension-based ownership, social wealth funds, and intellectual-property participation.
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Abundance Institute: Energy Abundance, State by State. The institute will compare how U.S. states can expand generation and transmission to meet data center demand while producing measurable local benefits, creating a state policy framework, historical analysis, and a Data Center Atlas policy layer.
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Progressive Policy Institute (PPI): Person-based Benefits in the Age of Information. PPI will design a person-based benefits system covering retirement, health, leave, education, training, and disability across different forms of work. It will prototype a “livelihood insurance” mechanism triggered by broad occupational changes and identify legislative and technical changes needed for implementation.
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Tax Foundation: Tax Policy in the Age of AI. The Tax Foundation will analyze how AI adoption could shift the balance among labor income, corporate profits, capital gains, and other revenue sources. A final white paper with quantitative analysis will assess taxation options against criteria including neutrality, simplicity, transparency, stability, and economic efficiency.
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Windfall Trust: National working groups for AI economic policy. Windfall Trust will scale a network of working groups in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, European Union, and Latin America and launch an International Working Group focused on international economic preparedness and coordination. The groups will connect economists, policy experts, pollsters, and regional partners and produce public syntheses of their findings.
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Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA): Building Resilient Research in the Intelligence Age. IMPA will study what research institutions need to turn AI access into meaningful scientific progress—engineering support, training, governance, compute, and local infrastructure—and develop a transferable measurement and cost framework, practical guidance for trustworthy AI use in mathematics, and a public report.
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Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo (HCFMUSP): People-First AI Clinical Infrastructure for Public Hospitals. HCFMUSP will perform a controlled, pre-deployment evaluation of an AI-enabled clinical information infrastructure prototype for Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS). Using only synthetic or properly de-identified data, the project will assess whether people-first clinical AI can reduce fragmented record review, improve clinician workflows, support evidence-based care and risk stratification, and help patients navigate services while preserving physician judgment and human oversight.
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Institute for Security and Technology (IST): Operational Framework for Uncontrolled RSI—Measurement, Coordination, and Response. IST will create a measurement and coordination framework for recursively self-improving (RSI) AI systems, including technically grounded definitions, observable indicators of uncontrolled self-modification, incident taxonomies for cross-lab communication, and escalation criteria mapping technical signals to coordinated response decisions.
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Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI | bio): Designing Cross-Border Information-Sharing for AIxBio Risk. NTI | bio will test the legal feasibility of secure international sharing of AI capabilities, risks, and mitigations, and then design a basic information-sharing architecture to enhance international AIxBio safety and security.
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Council on Strategic Risks (CSR): Safer with People—A Frontier AI-Safety Module and Lab Immersion for National Security Professionals. CSR’s Converging Risks Lab will examine how national-security professionals can build institutional capacity in frontier-AI safety and governance through fellowships, lab engagement, and public-facing analysis on oversight and preserving meaningful human control.
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Nanyang Technological University (NTU): Privacy-Preserving LLM Agents for Auditable Government Policy Simulation. NTU will develop and evaluate an AI-agent framework that turns individual-level financial transaction data into privacy-preserving behavioral profiles to simulate how households would respond to government transfers and industrial policies. The project will deliver a prototype, a profile schema, auditable reports explaining predictions, and guardrails for responsible government use.
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Yonsei University: AI-enabled democratic accountability. Yonsei will test whether transparent, human-validated AI methods can help assess the quality of oversight in South Korea’s National Assembly. The initial phase will produce an analytical report, a pilot dataset, and a codebook examining evidence use, polarization, and oversight quality.
What OpenAI says about the grants
In Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age, OpenAI argued that governments should be prepared to use a full policy toolbox—from research funding and workforce development to market-shaping tools and targeted regulation—to manage a transition of this scale. The company acknowledges that no single firm or government has all the answers. The stated purpose of these grants is to broaden the set of institutions working on those answers by supporting independent organizations worldwide as they test ideas, build evidence, and contribute to democratic deliberation about how AI can expand opportunity and strengthen resilience. The projects are presented as initial steps whose results should inform broader public debate.
