OpenAI is putting $1 million in cash and up to $1 million in API credits behind 14 independent projects aimed at figuring out how societies can actually share the benefits of advanced AI. The grants follow through on a commitment from the company’s April 2026 ‘Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age’ paper, which argued that policy responses need to be as ambitious as the technology itself.
The selected projects span the US, EU, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea, and they’re not just churning out white papers. Some will build prototypes, datasets, and frameworks meant to be tested in practice. The American Enterprise Institute and Urban Institute are teaming up on a bipartisan commission to model low-, moderate-, and high-disruption scenarios for AI’s impact on employment. The Centre for European Policy Studies will examine how AI-driven productivity gains are distributed across workers, firms, and regions in Europe, benchmarking the EU against the US. ECIPE is developing a ‘Right to AI’ framework that compares models like employee ownership, citizen investment, and social wealth funds.
More than 400 people and organizations responded to the call for proposals. That’s a striking level of interest for a relatively modest funding pool, suggesting the policy world is hungry for resources to think through AI’s economic consequences. OpenAI frames the grants as a way to ensure decisions about AI deployment aren’t made by tech companies alone — a recognition that the company’s own policy prescriptions need external scrutiny.
ChatGPT’s reach now sits at 1 billion users worldwide, spanning every major age group and income level. But OpenAI’s argument here is that access alone doesn’t guarantee broadly shared benefits. The harder question is what happens to workers, tax systems, energy infrastructure, and social safety nets as AI capabilities advance. These grants are a bet that independent researchers can generate answers faster than governments can — and that some of those answers will challenge OpenAI’s own assumptions.
