OpenAI wants to raise taxes on the rich, expand the welfare state, let workers decide how their employers use artificial intelligence, and give everyone a cut of the tech industry’s profits.
OpenAI’s oddly socialist, wildly hypocritical new economic agenda
The AI company released a set of highly progressive policy ideas. There’s just one small problem.
Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine.
Or so the company claims in a new vision statement.
In that document, the AI titan argues that the government needs to enact sweeping economic reforms, so as to “share prosperity broadly” in “the age of intelligence.”
The plan received far more attention than your typical policy white paper, due largely to its improbable author. Tech companies do not typically issue sweeping proposals for restructuring the American economy.
This said, OpenAI’s vision statement is not entirely unprecedented. AI moguls have long warned that their technology could cause mass unemployment, while gesturing toward the need for income redistribution.
Still, even by those standards of Silicon Valley thought leadership, the agenda OpenAI outlines is remarkably progressive. In fact, it overlaps heavily with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s own AI proposals (minus his moratorium on data center construction). Since advanced AI could shift income away from workers and toward business owners, OpenAI proposes the creation of a “public wealth fund.” Essentially, the government would purchase a stake in the nation’s most profitable companies and then give shares to every US citizen. In other words, it would give Americans a little socialism, as a treat.
OpenAI also calls for, among other things: higher capital gains taxes; more public funding for jobs in health care, education, and community service; giving workers more influence over corporate governance; and holding AI companies accountable to new safety regulations.
All of these policies are hazily sketched. The document is 13 pages and dedicates only a short paragraph to most of its proposals. It reads a lot like something that ChatGPT would spit out, if you asked it to research ideas for combating AI-induced inequality for 10 minutes.
For OpenAI’s progressive critics, however, its agenda is less irksome for its laziness than its hypocrisy: The political behavior of its top leaders belies the firm’s purported commitment to egalitarian reform.
In truth, OpenAI is engaging in one of Silicon Valley’s most annoying traditions: advertising its support for radical new social policies that have no actual chance of becoming law in the near-term, while ignoring — if not abetting — attacks on actual welfare programs in the here and now.
For years now, tech billionaires have been worrying aloud about how artificial intelligence could swell inequality and unemployment. And many have argued that the government must create a universal basic income (UBI) — a guaranteed minimum salary for every American — to account for this risk. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were all making versions of that argument as far back as 2017.
Of course, there was no actual prospect of Congress creating a UBI that year. By contrast, congressional Republicans did try to gut the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
The people in charge of OpenAI have made their political priorities clear — and sharing “prosperity broadly” is not among them.
It is hard to see how one could believe that 1) everyone should collect an income, regardless of their employment status and 2) people shouldn’t necessarily receive health insurance if they don’t have a job.
If tech-induced inequality justifies universal cash benefits, presumably it also demands universal health care. Yet Musk, Zuckerberg, and many of the Valley’s other UBI proponents made little effort to thwart the GOP’s attempted repeal of Obamacare. Nor did they mobilize to prevent the expiration of Joe Biden’s enhanced Child Tax Credit, a policy that effectively guaranteed a minimum income for all parents with young children.
In 2026, the disconnect between OpenAI’s advocacy for legislatively irrelevant reforms — and its approach to live political debates — is even larger. While the company floats collective ownership of the AI industry in PDFs, its leaders are bankrolling the welfare state’s opponents.
OpenAI itself is staying out of political races. In September, though, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Along with OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen, Brockman has also poured funds into Leading Our Future, a PAC dedicated to electing opponents of state-level AI regulations. As part of that effort, the group is supporting a wide array of Republican candidates.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, maxed out donations to several Republican lawmakers in 2024, while throwing $1 million toward Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
If this cash bought Altman and Brockman any influence with the White House, there’s no sign they used it to oppose Trump’s push for new work requirements on food stamps and Medicaid last year.
And yet, those policies are totally antithetical to the economic philosophy that OpenAI is now broadcasting. Surely, if the threat of mass, AI-induced unemployment demands the creation of a public wealth fund, it must also forbid choking off basic medical care to millions of people who can’t find work.
Nevertheless, OpenAI’s leaders did not feel compelled to publicly oppose Trump’s legislation. And Brockman’s super PAC appears to put zero weight on its candidates’ social welfare policies. Whether it is intervening Republican primaries or Democratic ones, the group’s sole concern seems to be blocking state-level AI safety regulations — including several that OpenAI ostensibly endorses in its vision statement.
Bleeding-heart billionaires should get back to the basics
Of course, there are worse things than hypocrisy. I’d rather see AI companies virtue signal about wealth redistribution than, say, build chatbots who rant about “white genocide.”
Further, I suspect that the actual authors of OpenAI’s “industrial policy” document are sincere. The company’s leadership and employees don’t have the same politics (the latter donated overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2024).
Nevertheless, the people in charge of OpenAI have made their political priorities clear — and sharing “prosperity broadly” is not among them.
Wealthy techies who are genuinely concerned with that objective, however, should probably spend a bit less energy on cooking up half-baked UBI proposals — and a bit more on intervening in actual legislative fights over social welfare policy.
