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STANFORD, California — More than 200 leading economists and artificial intelligence researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, have issued a joint statement warning that rapid advances in AI could cause unprecedented economic disruption. The document, titled "We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy," was released on Monday, July 13, 2026, by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The signatories, drawn from major AI labs and academic institutions, call on governments and technology leaders to move quickly to establish policies and institutions that can manage the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI systems. They state that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but on a much shorter timeline, leaving workers, companies, and public institutions with very little time to adapt. The initiative was organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, who frame the effort as an urgent response to the speed of current AI progress. Korinek, a professor at the University of Virginia who joined Anthropic's economic research team in March, said earlier technological shifts such as steam power, electricity, and computers gave societies decades to adjust, whereas AI may allow only a few years. He argued that policymakers cannot improvise strategies and institutions in the middle of such a transition and warned that waiting for complete certainty would mean acting too late. High-profile industry executives and researchers, including OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, joined the Nobel Laureates and other experts in signing the statement.

Prepared by Christopher Adams and reviewed by editorial team.