OpenAI backs 14 policy projects on economic opportunity and resilience in the Intelligence Age

What OpenAI announced

OpenAI announced on August 17, 2026 that it is supporting 14 independent projects focused on how societies can expand economic opportunity and resilience as AI capabilities advance. The initiative follows OpenAI's earlier policy work on the Intelligence Age and is intended to move from high-level proposals toward concrete research, prototypes, datasets and policy frameworks.

Funding and scope

According to OpenAI, more than 400 people and organizations responded to the call for proposals. The selected projects will collectively receive $1 million in grant funding plus up to $1 million in API credits. The projects span the United States, European Union, Brazil, Singapore and South Korea. They include work on workforce-disruption scenarios, privacy-preserving AI-agent simulations for government policy, and other approaches intended to test how AI-related policy could work in practice.

Why this matters

The useful signal here is not that any one policy idea has already been proven. Instead, the programme creates a set of time-bounded experiments run by independent institutions. OpenAI says projects will run for six months and report results in 2027. That gives researchers, policymakers and AI practitioners a concrete set of future outputs to watch when evaluating claims about AI's effects on work, institutions and economic opportunity.

Readers should treat the programme as a funding and experimentation initiative rather than evidence that the proposed policy interventions are already effective.