STANFORD, Calif. – July 13, 2026 – Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Prize winners, published their findings “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI‘s transformation of the economy,” calls for urgent preparation for the economic impact of radically more powerful AI.
Organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham, the statement warns that increasingly powerful 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, businesses and public institutions.
The statement calls on economists, policymakers and technology leaders to deepen research on AI‘The economic impact must be considered and work must begin to build the necessary policies and institutions to ensure that AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.
“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic impact. The greatest opportunities of our time lie in this gap. We must act now to make AI complement humans rather than simply imitate them — and create 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 advances in AI, coupled with a high degree of uncertainty about the extent and timing of impacts in many parts of the economy, require one ‘All hands on deck‘ Approach to steer AI in beneficial directions,” said Michael Spence, Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at New York University.
“I‘I am delighted to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need to reimagine 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 only give us a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the midst of change; Waiting for certainty means being late,” said Anton Korinek, a professor at the University of Virginia who is currently on leave from Anthropic.
“Whether rapidly advancing AI will increase global living standards across the board or greatly concentrate wealth is not predetermined. It depends on how we choose to redesign our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for complete change and, in the meantime, rely on an institutional framework optimized for a world ahead of high-fidelity prediction.” said Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto‘s Rotman School of Management.
“We are driving in a fog and it is exceedingly difficult to predict what will happen next. It is the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.” said Tom Cunningham, researcher at METR.
The declaration was 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 can be found at http://wemustactnow.ai/.
https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/wemustactnow/
