A group of economists and tech industry figures has called on policymakers to address the risks posed by artificial intelligence more directly.

The signatories outlined their concerns in a public letter published today.

The initiative was organized by economics professors Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham. More than half of the 200-plus other signatories to the letter are also economists, and more than a dozen are Nobel Prize laureates.

The brief document calls on policymakers to “build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction” that benefits humanity. The letter adds that the regulatory push should include input from economists and technology experts. 

The signatories point to the rapid advance of AI models as the motivation behind the letter. “AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” reads the letter. “This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.”

The economists who signed the letter were joined by dozens of tech industry figures. The group includes former Google LLC Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, prominent startup investor Vinod Khosla and Jeff Wilke, the former head of Amazon.com Inc.’s consumer business. Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean signed as well. 

The executives participated alongside nearly two dozen Anthropic PBC and OpenAI employees. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark was among the signatories. Two employees at Thinking Machines Inc., an AI startup led by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, participated as well. 

AI “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards,” the signatories wrote in the letter.

The letter comes less than a year after technology-focused nonprofit Future of Life Institute organized a similar initiative. It released a public letter in which Geoffrey Hinton and other prominent researchers urged the suspension of efforts to develop AI, or artificial general intelligence. That’s a hypothetical form of AI capable of performing many tasks better than humans.

More recently, OpenAI published a policy paper with recommendations on how AI should be regulated. Like today’s public letter, the company called on lawmakers to form new institutions focused on addressing the technology’s risks. OpenAI’s paper also floated dozens of other ideas including the creation of an AI-focused sovereign wealth funding. 

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. government could take a 5% stake in OpenAI and other frontier AI labs. It’s believed that the shares could be used to fund a sovereign wealth fund similar to the one the ChatGPT developer’s paper suggested.

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