OpenAI Funds 14 Think Tanks to Research AI Economic Disruption
OpenAI has awarded $1 million in cash grants and $1 million in model credits to 14 policy organizations across the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America to study AI's economic and societal impacts.
OpenAI has named the recipients of a global grant initiative designed to fund research into the economic and societal consequences of artificial intelligence. The program distributes cash and compute resources to policy organizations working on labor disruption, social safety nets, and AI governance.
The initiative will award $1 million in direct grants alongside up to $1 million in OpenAI model credits across 14 selected projects, according to Semafor. Recipient organizations span multiple continents, including policy institutions based in the United States, Europe, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea.
The US grantee list cuts across the ideological spectrum. Selected groups include the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the center-left Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the Tax Foundation, and the non-proliferation focused Nuclear Threat Initiative. Some projects pair opposing institutes directly; AEI is collaborating with the liberal Urban Institute on a joint study of workforce displacement.
Specific proposals under development include a PPI project to design a person-based benefits system tailored to an automated economy. Other grantees will examine how existing tax codes, national security frameworks, and public institutions must adapt to rapid advances in AI.
The funding emerged from an industrial policy framework OpenAI published earlier this year. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, said that ambitious policy ideas are necessary to ensure the economic gains of AI reach broad populations rather than concentrating among a small group of market leaders.
The Cognarah Angle
Corporate grants to policy institutions are a well-worn playbook for Big Tech companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Fund the ecosystem that advises lawmakers, and the conversation shifts before any legislation is drafted. OpenAI is executing that playbook with notable precision, distributing modest capital to earn goodwill across both sides of the political aisle simultaneously.
The math is worth pausing on. A $1 million cash pool split across 14 global institutions works out to less than $75,000 per project. For a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, this is a rounding error deployed to shape international policy debates. The accompanying $1 million in model credits does something subtler still: it encourages researchers to study the future of AI-driven economies using OpenAI's own proprietary tools, embedding institutional dependence into the research process itself.
Funding both conservative and progressive think tanks in the same cycle is not pluralism; it is coverage. When these institutions publish white papers on workforce transition or automated welfare systems, policymakers will read them as independent analysis. Few will note prominently that the dominant commercial actor in generative AI underwrote the work.
Can public policy remain credible when the company most likely to be regulated is also funding the research that frames what regulation should look like?
Reporting sourced from Semafor. Analysis and Cognarah Angle are Cognarah's own.
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