An Open letter signed by over 200 prominent economists and tech leaders including 16 Nobel laureates, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and investor Vinod Khosla issued a warning about artificial intelligence and its potential for issues like large-scale job displacement.
“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” reads the letter organised by Stanford University’s digital economy lab. “This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”
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The signatories also include OpenAI and Anthropic’s chief economists, along with “AI godfathers” Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun who are reportedly among the people who laid the foundation of AI.
“Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society,” the latter added.
Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia professor who organised the initiative, stressed that the window for action is narrowing.
“We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late,” Korinek said.
Bengio said that “it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies.”
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“We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind,” wrote Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal.he letter comes amid rising signs of AI’s toll on employment. In October, Amazon announced it was cutting about 14,000 jobs, months after its chief executive revealed that generative AI and agents would be taking over some roles. Earlier this year, Amazon announced it has cut about 16,000 corporate jobs, bringing total layoffs to roughly 30,000 since October 2025, and signaled that more reductions could still be ahead.
According to reports, recent college graduates are facing an increasingly tight labor market. These concerns also extend beyond individual workers. In December, the United Nations warned that AI could deepen inequality between nations, wealthier countries accessing most of the gains from the technology while poorer countries risk being left behind.