A four-sentence statement backed by 16 Nobel laureates and signatories from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic warns that the window to prepare for AI's economic shock is closing fast.
More than 200 economists and AI researchers signed a joint statement released Monday, July 13, 2026, warning that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution — but compressed into a span measured in years, not the decades earlier shifts allowed. Organized through the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, it carries the names of 16 Nobel laureates alongside senior figures from inside the companies building the technology.
"Steam, electricity and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years," said Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economist and one of the statement's organizers. We Must Act Now warns that AI could become radically more powerful within a decade, framing large-scale job displacement as a central risk and major gains in living standards as the corresponding opportunity.
The statement calls on economists, policymakers and technology leaders to act now — to build the incentives, guardrails and institutions needed to guide AI so it complements people and serves the public.
The roster is an unusual one, pairing academic critics with the people shipping the systems: Nobel economists Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke sit alongside OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. Even Daron Acemoglu, the MIT Nobel laureate whom Fortune describes as the most rigorous skeptic of AI productivity claims, signed on, telling Fortune that recent advances have left him more worried about near-term disruption.
For all the standing of its signatories, the letter is spare — four sentences that name no specific policy measures or timelines. It also lands at an awkward moment for its own message: days earlier, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said he was "pretty sure" AI has been a net job creator so far.
What the organizers stress is that the outcome is not fixed. Whether AI broadly lifts living standards or sharply concentrates wealth "is not predetermined," wrote Ajay Agrawal, a University of Toronto economist who helped organize the effort; "it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today."