'We must act now': 200+ economists, AI leaders warn of sweeping economic disruption from AI

A group of more than 200 economists, AI researchers and technology leaders has issued an 88-word open letter warning that increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems could transform the global economy at an unprecedented pace, urging policymakers to prepare before the technology outpaces existing institutions. 

Titled We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy, the statement was organised by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham under Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab. It has been signed by more than 200 prominent figures, including 16 Nobel laureates, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. 

The statement, comprising just four sentences and 88 words, reads: "AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards." It continued, “Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society." 

The letter does not prescribe specific policy measures but calls for greater research into AI's economic effects and for governments, economists and technology companies to begin building institutions capable of responding to rapid technological change. The organisers said AI could deliver substantial productivity gains and improvements in living standards while also posing significant risks for workers, businesses and public institutions if left unmanaged. 

“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era. We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York University, said that the scale, scope, and speed of the advances in AI, combined with a high level of uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of the impacts across many parts of the economy, call for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to steering AI in beneficial directions. 

“We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and, in the meantime, rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimised for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Debate over jobs continues

The statement comes amid an intensifying debate over AI's impact on employment, with recent corporate restructurings fuelling concerns while companies continue to argue that AI is also creating new categories of work. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced plans to eliminate about 4,800 jobs as it restructures parts of its business while continuing to invest heavily in AI infrastructure. According to layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, about 120,000 technology workers have lost their jobs across 228 companies so far in 2026.