A group of more than 200 economists, including 15 Nobel Prize winners, just signed a letter warning that AI job displacement could be on a scale bigger than the Industrial Revolution. The letter is called “We Must Act Now.”
The signatories include Eric Schmidt, Vinod Khosla, Jeff Wilke (the former head of Amazon’s consumer business), and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. Nearly two dozen employees from Anthropic and OpenAI also signed. The group was organized by economics professors Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, according to SiliconANGLE’s coverage.
“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” the letter reads. “This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a much shorter timespan.”
The letter calls on policymakers to “build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that benefits humanity.” It warns that AI could bring “large-scale job displacement” alongside opportunities like “major gains in living standards.”
This is the latest and broadest economic warning about AI job displacement, but it’s not an isolated event. I covered how companies are already spending more on AI than the workers they replaced, and Anthropic’s own Economic Index showed how people are actually using AI at work. This letter takes those trends and asks: what happens when the pace accelerates?
Who Signed and Why AI Job Displacement Is the Focus
The economist-heavy list is what makes this letter different from previous AI warnings. Previous letters, like the Future of Life Institute’s 2023 call for a training pause, were dominated by tech executives and AI researchers. This one is explicitly about economics.
The signatories span the political spectrum. Nobel laureates in economics joined former tech CEOs and current AI lab employees. Two staff from Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati’s startup, also signed. The breadth suggests this is not a fringe concern.
What They Want
The letter doesn’t call for a pause or a ban. It calls for new institutions and guardrails. It asks policymakers to bring economists and technologists together to design the regulatory framework before, not after, the transformation hits.
That’s a subtle but important difference. The message is not “stop AI.” It’s “prepare for what’s coming.”
The Counterpoint
For context: not every economist agrees that AI will destroy jobs at scale. A Fortune article from April found that thousands of CEOs reported AI had no measurable impact on employment or productivity yet, complicating the AI job displacement narrative. And a study from late June showed companies that use AI most are actually leading a hiring boom.
The “We Must Act Now” letter doesn’t ignore this tension. It acknowledges both the risks of displacement and the potential for rising living standards. The question is whether policymakers will act before the curve steepens.
