The Memo - Special edition - OpenAI’s Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age - 6/Apr/2026
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 6/Apr/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 97% ASI: 0/50 (no expected...
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 6/Apr/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 97% ASI: 0/50 (no expected movement until post-AGI)Since 2020, I’ve had the privilege of advising the massive sovereign wealth funds (wiki) (>US$500B) and major governments across Asia, the Middle East, and the US on the impact of AI. Without exception, all the teams I’ve advised seem to really care about the economics and distribution of wealth post-AGI, and they want to get it right. Six years later, we finally have a plain-English paper from one of the organizations that actually matters. OpenAI today released a 13-page document (and associated literature, linked below) called Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First. Here are the main recommendations from the first section of OpenAI’s document, ‘Building an Open Economy’. Important points are in bold, followed by source quotes from the document in brackets, and my commentary in plain text.Superintelligence is now the working assumption rather than a moonshot (‘we’re beginning a transition toward superintelligence: AI systems capable of outperforming the smartest humans even when [the humans] are assisted by AI’). Note the framing here, OpenAI is on written record that superintelligence is happening right now. For similar work, see my press releases on the same subject over the past five years in the footnotes.120% reduction in working hours (‘Incentivize employers and unions to run time-bound 32-hour/four-day workweek pilots with no loss in pay that hold output and service levels constant, then convert reclaimed hours into a permanent shorter week, bankable paid time off, or both’). Obviously, I expect all major labs and governments know that the effects of AI will expand to a 100% reduction in human working hours shortly. The zero-day workweek is coming soon.Robots do the work, so tax the robots (‘exploring new approaches such as taxes related to automated labor’). It shouldn’t be news that we are in the middle of an evolution where AI + humanoid robots will discover new materials, mine both new and old materials, build our structures, build each other, repair and maintain each other, and do all the heavy lifting needed for humanity to flourish. OpenAI’s CEO has been thinking along these same lines for years. He spelled out how the wealth from all this might be taxed and redistributed back in his 2021 piece Moore’s Law for Everything. I also talk about this in plain English in my 2024 children’s story, Happily ever after, or listen here (link):‘Since the humanoids could make anything anyone needed – like food, toys, houses, and clothes – nobody needed money anymore! It was just like how we don’t need to trade seashells or pretty feathers to get things anymore (which is how people used to shop a very long time ago).’Payroll and other taxes are about to crater (‘As AI reshapes work and production, the composition of economic activity may shift—expanding corporate profits and capital gains while potentially reducing reliance on labor income and payroll taxes. This could erode the tax base that funds core programs like Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance, putting them at risk’). This is the other half of the robot-tax conversation. If humans aren’t earning wages, governments can’t collect payroll tax on those wages, and the entire 20th-century social safety net runs on payroll tax. OpenAI is openly flagging that the funding model for Medicare and Social Security breaks under their own product roadmap.Sovereign wealth fund for every citizen (‘Create a Public Wealth Fund that provides every citizen, including those not invested in financial markets, with a stake in AI-driven economic growth’). This is already a solved problem, and there are two flavours. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (wiki) holds over US$2 trillion of North Sea oil money (about US$325,000 per citizen on paper) and quietly funds the national budget in the background, though no Norwegian ever sees a cheque. Alaska runs the other model: every resident, including kids, gets a real cheque every October from the state’s Permanent Fund (wiki). The 2024 dividend was US$1,702 per person, so a family of four pocketed US$6,808, no questions, and no means testing. OpenAI’s proposal is closer to the Alaska model, distributing AI-generated wealth the same way Alaska already distributes oil-generated wealth.Robots do the science (‘Build a distributed network of AI-enabled laboratories to dramatically expand the capacity to test and validate AI-generated hypotheses at scale’). I cover the biggest example of this (happening right now in the US) in my 2026 paper, Genesis Mission A Comprehensive Analysis of US Science Datasets.Today’s frontier already runs hour-long tasks, months-long projects next (‘Frontier systems have advanced from supporting tasks that take people minutes to complete, to tasks that take them hours to complete. If progress continues, we can expect systems to be capable of carrying out projects that currently take people months’). In The Memo edition 28/Feb/2026, we covered how frontier models can now complete 14.5-hour tasks (outperforming the 8-hour human workday by 81%):METR 50% time horizon: Claude Opus 4.6 at 14.5 hours. Click to enlarge.OpenAI names OpenAI as a concentration risk (‘There is also a risk that the economic gains concentrate within a small number of firms like OpenAI, even as the technology itself becomes more powerful and widely used’). My bet is actually on Google DeepMind via Alphabet being the clear ‘winner’ of all this, and I expect to be proven right over the next few months and years. However, none of this matters, as I noted in my recent paper on Palantir (now available to the general public), where Dr Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, put his neck on the line about the real economic impact of ASI:[When AI reaches and surpasses human-level intelligence,] Suddenly the nature of money even changes… I don’t know if company constructs would even be the right thing to think about… We don’t want to have to wait till the eve before AGI happens… we should be preparing for that now. (24/Feb/2024).A ‘Right to AI’ on par with literacy and electricity (‘Treat access to AI as foundational for participation in the modern economy, similar to mass efforts to increase global literacy, or to make sure that electricity and the internet reach remote parts of the globe’). I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last week or so. Electricity was scary to a lot of people in the late 1800s, and took a long time to distribute. We now get power from the sun, or a national grid, own our own batteries and battery-powered devices, and it can be hard to think of a life without it! (I write this special edition from a nearly-completely-off-grid cabin in the woods this week, so you can imagine my nervousness when I had to pull together all these resources over the air without fibre or other modern conveniences that have become the norm!)A note on timing. OpenAI’s April 2026 blueprint maps almost one-for-one onto a paper I published in July 2022, Roadmap: AI’s next big steps in the world. I’m pleased to see the conversation catching up! The full 2022 Roadmap is at LifeArchitect.ai/roadmap.A note on risks. OpenAI’s paper has a second section on ‘Building a Resilient Society’, full of cyber threats, bio threats, model containment, and other doomy bits. I’m not going to cover that here. You already know my view: the upside of AI is so vast, so close, and so good for humanity that the pessimism reads like standing on sunny Waikiki Beach in Hawaii and wondering about the chance of snow… Interesting, but missing the point entirely. We’re now inside the era of ending disease, ending slavery (including 9–5, cubicles, factories), and the beginning of complete abundance. For more on this, see my ASI checklist.Read the original OpenAI source document (PDF, 13 pages, 4MB), or the short blog post. 202604 Openai Industrial Policy For The Intelligence Age3.85MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadAlongside the OpenAI document, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was interviewed by Axios.Altman frames the whole thing as a New Deal moment (wiki) (‘AI superintelligence is so close, so mind-bending, so disruptive that America needs a new social contract, on the scale of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, and the New Deal during the Great Depression’).The 13-page blueprint is a starting gun, not a prescription (‘We want to put these things into the conversation. Some will be good. Some will be bad. But, we do feel a sense of urgency’).Axios calls the Public Wealth Fund the boldest idea in the document (‘This is the most radical idea in the document’).Altman concedes the decisions are too big for any single person (‘it’s very important that no one person is making the decisions by themselves that are going to impact all of us’).Axios reads the paper as positioning as much as policy (‘OpenAI is trying to position itself as the responsible actor in the room, the company that warned you and offered solutions, a lane Anthropic first filled’).And as a pre-emptive move on regulators (‘It’s also a play to shape regulation before regulation shapes them’).Axios’ closing line is the keeper (‘The man betting everything on superintelligence is telling the world that this thing is coming so fast, and so hard, that capitalism as we know it won’t be enough’).Read the full Axios piece. You can also listen to the source, though I’d never recommend exposing yourself to Sam’s affected Silicon Valley vocal fry (wiki).Of all the things that are happening in AI over the last week or two, this one seems to me to be the most important. The upcoming OpenAI GPT-IMAGE-2 was a close contender for a special edition, and we’ll be back with the best of the best in the next regular edition.Expert calls: If you or your team would like to have an expert call about this document, please contact us by replying to this email, and we’ll get you set up.All my very best,AlanLifeArchitect.aiSearch | Archives1I’ve been talking about this since 2020 via direct government advisory, industry consulting, media releases, videos, and more. Here are a few of the big releases:19/Sep/2021: ‘AI is outperforming humans in both IQ and creativity in 2021’ https://lifearchitect.ai/outperforming-humans/20/Jul/2021: ‘AI fire alarm’ https://lifearchitect.ai/fire-alarm/Jan/2022: ‘AI report submission to UN’ https://lifearchitect.ai/un/Jul/2022: ‘Roadmap: AI’s next big steps in the world’ https://lifearchitect.ai/roadmap/25/Oct/2023: ‘Leaders guilty of negligence’ https://lifearchitect.ai/leaders-guilty-of-negligence/2021–present: The Memo editions including the one that you’re reading right now!Source: Life Architect AI — Published — Category: Models