On August 17, 2026, OpenAI said it is awarding grants to 14 independent projects aimed at turning high-level policy proposals into concrete research, prototypes, and policy models. The effort follows the April 2026 report Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age and is intended to support independent testing and public debate about how AI will affect work, welfare, and public institutions.
Scope and goals
OpenAI stated that AI is rapidly increasing in capability and reach: ChatGPT is used by 1 billion people globally. The grants focus on two broad questions identified by OpenAI—how AI can broaden economic opportunity, and how societies can build resilience as capabilities advance. More than 400 people and organizations responded to the call for proposals.
Selected projects and activities
The funded projects span the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea and include research, policy design, and technical prototypes.
Under “Building a more open economy,” examples include AEI‑Urban bipartisan commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the American Workforce, which will develop low-, moderate-, and high-disruption employment scenarios and link observable indicators to policy playbooks. CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies) will analyze how AI-driven productivity gains are distributed in Europe and propose principles for adaptive safety nets. ECIPE (European Centre for International Political Economy) will explore broader access to AI and ownership models, including a proposed “Right to AI.” Other projects in this stream include work from Abundance Institute, Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), Tax Foundation, Windfall Trust, IMPA, and HCFMUSP, each addressing topics from energy and data center impacts to person-based benefits, tax policy, institutional research capacity, and a pre-deployment clinical AI infrastructure prototype for Brazil’s SUS.
Under “Building a more resilient society,” projects include IST (Institute for Security and Technology) developing a framework for measuring and responding to uncontrolled recursively self-improving (RSI) AI, NTI | bio testing legal designs for cross-border information sharing on AIxBio risks, CSR’s Converging Risks Lab training national-security professionals on frontier-AI safety, NTU creating privacy-preserving LLM agents for auditable policy simulation, and Yonsei University evaluating AI-enabled methods to assess legislative oversight in South Korea.
OpenAI will provide a total of $1 million in funding and up to $1 million in API credits. Projects are scheduled to run for six months, with results to be reported in 2027.
Original source: OpenAI News