OpenAI calls for taxing AI use to shore up fraying safety nets

OpenAI is floating a plan for the US government to tax automated labor and shift the country's tax base away from wages – a policy pivot that could have direct consequences for the social programs millions of Americans depend on, as well as the investors and advisors who help them plan around those programs.

The proposals are laid out in a 13-page policy document calling for sweeping economic reforms, titled "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First," released as Congress prepares to debate AI legislation.

The manifesto released on Monday represents a turn from OpenAI's January 2025 Economic Blueprint, which focused on infrastructure investment and light-touch regulation. Now, it's directly addressing a three-headed elephant in the room that includes wealth redistribution, job displacement, and the limits of existing social safety nets.

At the heart of the tax argument is a structural warning: AI-driven automation could quietly drain the revenue streams that fund the country's core entitlement programs.

"As AI reshapes work and production, the composition of economic activity may shift – expanding corporate profits and capital gains while potentially reducing reliance on labor income and payroll taxes," OpenAI said, adding that "this could erode the tax base that funds core programs like Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance – putting them at risk."

Even before AI job disruption concerns came about, think tanks, senior advocacy groups, and various other stakeholders have been sounding alarms on how the worsening federal debt situation would impact the solvency of Social Security. In February, the Congressional Budget Office released a new 10-year outlook projecting that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund woiuld run dry by 2032.

To offset that erosion, OpenAI suggests the government could increase its reliance on capital-based revenues like capital gains and corporate income, as well as "exploring new approaches such as taxes related to automated labor" – cast as a form of "robot tax" in reporting by TechCrunch and other outlets.

The idea of a robot tax concept is not new; Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposed a version of it in 2017, which involved the robot paying the same amount of taxes into the system as the human it replaced.

The backdrop to the proposals is a labor market already showing strain. White-collar payrolls have contracted for 29 consecutive months, a stretch economists describe as unprecedented outside a recession – and researchers have documented a decline in demand even for elite business school graduates. Already, AI is displacing demand for white-collar workers – look at Oracle's move to lay off up to 30,000 of its workers last week for the latest high-profile example – while the technology's positive job-creation effects remain years away.

Alongside the tax proposals, OpenAI envisions a nationally managed Public Wealth Fund as a mechanism for distributing AI-generated returns directly to citizens. The model is comparable to Alaska's Permanent Fund, which pays annual dividends to state residents from oil revenues. The fund would give every American citizen a direct stake in AI-driven economic growth, nationally managed, seeded in part by AI companies, and investing in diversified, long-term assets across both AI firms and businesses deploying the technology.

The blueprint also proposes building automatic triggers into the social safety net itself. A data-driven mechanism would expand government assistance without requiring new legislation each time — once measurements of AI-related job displacement cross defined limits, programs covering income support, wage insurance, and direct cash payments would activate automatically, and as labor market indicators recovered, the expanded benefits would wind down on their own.

The proposals arrive amid intensifying anxiety around AI, concerns about wealth concentration, and as the Trump administration moves toward a national AI framework and in the run-up to the midterm elections. OpenAI says this moment requires a "new industrial policy agenda that ensures superintelligence benefits everyone."

CEO Sam Altman framed the current moment as comparable to the Progressive Era of the early 1900s and the New Deal of the 1930s – periods when American institutions were rebuilt around new economic realities. On the document's scope, Altman told Axios he wants these ideas debated seriously:

"Some will be good. Some will be bad. But we do feel a sense of urgency," he said.