New statement warns that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution — on a vastly shorter timeline — and urges economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to prepare.
STANFORD, Calif., July 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI.
The statement, organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, warns that increasingly capable AI systems could reshape the economy at unprecedented speed. While AI offers enormous opportunities to improve productivity and living standards, it also raises important questions for workers, firms, and public institutions.
The statement calls on economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s economic impacts and to begin building the policies and institutions needed to ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.
“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.
“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,” said Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York University.
“I’m so happy to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need to redirect AI so that its risks are minimized and it can work for the benefit of workers and society,” said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT.
“Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late,” said Anton Korinek, Professor at the University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.
“Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
“We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next. It’s the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.” said Tom Cunningham, Researcher at METR.
The statement has been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers from leading universities and AI research organizations around the world. The full statement and the current list of signatories are available at http://wemustactnow.ai/.
About the Stanford Digital Economy Lab
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an interdisciplinary research group that studies how digital technologies are transforming work, organizations, and the economy. The Lab’s insights help companies, policymakers, students, and professionals respond to the complexities and promise of technological change. The Lab is part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Learn more at digitaleconomy.stanford.edu.
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SOURCE Stanford Digital Economy Lab
