OpenAI’s Economic Blueprint
The Blueprint outlines policy proposals for how the US can maximize AI’s benefits, bolster national security, and drive economic growth.
Today, OpenAI is releasing a new Economic Blueprint that lays out our policy proposals for extending America’s global leadership in AI innovation, ensuring equitable access to AI, and driving economic growth across communities nationwide.
As AI becomes more advanced, we believe America needs to act now to maximize the technology’s possibilities while minimizing its harms. AI is too powerful to be led and shaped by autocrats, but that is the growing risk we face, while the economic opportunity AI presents is too compelling to forfeit. Shared prosperity is as near and measurable as the new jobs and growth(opens in a new window) that will come from building more AI infrastructure like data centers, chip manufacturing facilities, and power plants. As our CEO Sam Altman has written(opens in a new window), AI will soon help our children do things we can’t. Not far off is a future in which everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now.
With such prosperity in sight, we want to work with policymakers to ensure that AI’s benefits are shared responsibly and equitably. This blueprint is designed to support the entrepreneurship and individual freedoms that have long been at the heart of the American innovation ecosystem.
If done right, the developers who are AI’s Main Street will thrive along with companies of all sizes, and the broad economic benefits of the technology will catalyze a reindustrialization across the country.
We’ve been here before
America has faced similar moments in the past, and we know how to think big, build big and act big. Now, it’s time to channel that same spirit as we enter the Intelligence Age.
Automobiles weren’t invented here—they were invented in Europe. Early proponents envisioned the car transforming how people lived and worked. Supply chains and customer bases could be expanded and diversified.
But in the United Kingdom, where some of the earliest cars were introduced, the new industry’s growth was stunted by regulation. The 1865 Red Flag Act required a flag bearer to walk ahead of any car to warn others on the road and wave the car aside in favor of horse-drawn transport. How could a person walk in front of a car without getting run over? Because of another requirement: that cars move no faster than 4 miles per hour.
America took a very different approach, and the country became the heart of the world’s auto industry, mass-producing affordable cars with the help of local, state and federal officials who saw the industry’s potential. Public safety concerns over horse-drawn vehicles on crowded city streets prompted local officials to support the switch to cars—not make cars yield to horses. The country’s size prompted states to invest in better roads. And the federal government cleared the way to scale transport by car with a national—rather than state-by-state—highway system.
Today, while some countries sideline AI and its economic potential, the US government can clear and scale the road for its AI industry to:
- Continue the country’s global leadership in innovation while protecting national security
- Make sure we get it right in AI access and benefits from the start
- Maximize the economic opportunity of AI for communities across the country.
And just as drivers are expected to stick to clear, common-sense standards that help keep the actual roads safe, developers and users have a responsibility to follow clear, common-sense standards that keep the AI roads safe. Straightforward, predictable rules that safeguard the public while helping innovators thrive can encourage investment, competition, and greater freedom for everyone.
The path forward
Chips, data, energy and talent are the keys to winning on AI—and this is a race America can and must win.
There’s an estimated $175 billion sitting in global funds awaiting investment in AI projects, and if the US doesn’t attract those funds, they will flow to China-backed projects—strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence.
We believe that making sure AI benefits the most people possible means enabling AI through common-sense rules aimed at protecting people from actual harms, and building democratic AI shaped by the values the US has always stood for, including:
- A free market promoting free and fair competition that drives innovation
- Freedom for developers and users to work with and direct our tools as they see fit, in exchange for following clear, common-sense standards that help keep AI safe for everyone, and being accountable when they don’t
- Preventing government use of AI tools to amass power and control their citizens, or to threaten or coerce other states.
As for any industry, we need common-sense rules of the road that safeguard the public while helping innovators thrive by encouraging investment, competition, and greater freedom for everyone—and to best achieve this, these rules should apply nationwide, rather than in a patchwork of state-by-state regulations.
We believe in America because America believes in innovation. This is why our CEO will be kicking off this work with a gathering in Washington, DC on January 30 to preview the state of AI advancement and how it can drive economic growth. And this is why that event will kick off our Innovating for America initiative to engage states across the country to help ensure that we’re bringing AI’s economic benefits to Americans from all walks of life.
This country always succeeds when it bets on its ecosystem of builders and entrepreneurs. This Blueprint, a living document we’ll update as we learn from our work to help solve people’s hard problems, lays out a relationship we believe we can build on with government here at home and as a place to begin with allies around the world.
The full Blueprint is available here(opens in a new window).