Stanford Digital Economy Lab AI Manifesto Signed by Nobel Laureates

On 13 July 2026, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab published a brief manifesto titled “We Must Act Now”. The document, less than 100 words, quickly gathered more than 400 signatures, including sixteen Nobel laureates such as Daron Acemoglu, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke, as well as leading AI researchers like Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

The manifesto warns that artificial intelligence could become “radically more powerful” within a decade, driving an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but compressed into a much shorter period. It highlights risks of large‑scale worker displacement and calls for the creation of incentives, safeguards and institutions that steer AI to complement rather than replace humans. The authors stress that the text does not ask for a pause or moratorium, but for deliberate, democratic engineering of the AI ecosystem.

The signatories argue that past waves of automation ultimately created more jobs than destroyed, thanks to time for societal adaptation. By uniting economists and technologists, the manifesto seeks to give governments a clear intellectual basis for proactive AI policy.