OpenAI Funds 14 Think Tanks — Right and Left — to Study AI's Economic Fallout

OpenAI selected 14 projects from more than 400 applicants for its new grant program on AI’s economic and societal impact, awarding a combined $1 million in direct funding plus up to $1 million more in OpenAI API credits. What stands out isn’t the amount — it’s the ideological spread: recipients include the American Enterprise Institute and the Progressive Policy Institute, the Tax Foundation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, alongside groups based in Europe, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea. The projects cluster around two questions: how AI can broaden economic opportunity, and how societies build resilience as AI systems grow more capable. The program follows through on commitments OpenAI made in its April 2026 paper “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.”

The move puts OpenAI in the same lane Anthropic staked out months earlier. Anthropic’s own $200 million Economic Futures Research Fund backs five priority areas — from field experiments on preserving human expertise inside AI-augmented workplaces to pilots modernizing unemployment insurance for scenarios of persistent displacement — with individual grants running $5 million to $30 million, an order of magnitude larger than OpenAI’s per-project awards. Anthropic has also been willing to spend on the advocacy side directly: it donated another $20 million to Public First Action in July, bringing its cumulative support for the group to $40 million, restricted to public education and explicitly barred from election influence.

Read together, the two labs are converging on the same bet: that funding external, publishable research on AI’s labor-market effects is now table stakes for a frontier lab’s public posture. They’re taking different routes to get there — OpenAI casting a wide net across many small, ideologically balanced grants, Anthropic concentrating fewer, larger awards alongside direct policy-advocacy spending. For consulting audiences advising clients on AI-driven workforce transitions, both funding streams are worth tracking as a leading indicator of where the evidence base — and the regulatory conversation — is headed next.