started · updated
Global Open Letter by 200 Economists Urges Immediate AI Regulation
More than 200 leading economists, AI researchers and technology executives—including 16 Nobel laureates—signed an open letter coordinated by Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab. The statement warns that artificial intelligence could become “radically more powerful” within the next decade and trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but in a much shorter time. It calls on governments and industry to urgently create incentives, guardrails and institutions to steer AI development toward societal benefit and to mitigate risks such as large‑scale job displacement.
Signatories such as Yoshua Bengio, Eric Schmidt, Daron Acemoglu and Michael Spence emphasized that without deliberate, democratic choices the technology could “leave most citizens behind”. The letter urges leaders to “build the incentives, barriers and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”