OpenAI is funding outside researchers to study what AI does to jobs and the economy — and it's taking applications now.
The company has launched the Economic Research Exchange, a program designed to support academic work on AI's effects on employment, productivity, and economic conditions broadly. Applications are open for selected research projects, though OpenAI hasn't disclosed how many projects it will fund, what the selection criteria are, or how large the grants will be. The details that matter most — who decides what gets studied and what findings get published — aren't in the announcement.
The timing is not subtle. Policymakers and economists are actively trying to measure AI's labor market effects, and whoever funds that research shapes which questions get asked. By standing up its own exchange, OpenAI positions itself at the center of a debate it has a clear commercial interest in; industry-funded research isn't inherently compromised, but it has a track record of producing conclusions congenial to the funder.
OpenAI is not the first tech company to bankroll research into its own externalities and call it a public good. It probably won't be the last.