OpenAI has announced a $1 million grant program backing 14 independent research projects that will study how artificial intelligence can broaden economic opportunity and strengthen societal resilience.

The initiative attracted more than 400 proposals from researchers around the world, with the selected projects spanning the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea — a cohort that covers both advanced and emerging economies. Each project will run for six months, with results expected in 2027.

From Policy Paper to Funding Pipeline

The program is a direct extension of OpenAI's April 2026 paper, "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age," in which the company pledged to support external research and policy development.

Beyond the $1 million in direct grants, OpenAI is offering the cohort up to $1 million in API credits, bringing the total potential commitment to $2 million. Together, the direct funding and compute resources are intended to support the researchers' experiments.

What the Projects Cover

The 14 projects are organized into two groups. The first, "Building a more open economy," comprises eight projects examining workforce dynamics, taxation strategies, ownership models, benefits systems, and how productivity gains from AI are distributed.

Those questions are already drawing attention from policymakers: a 2024 International Monetary Fund analysis estimated that roughly 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies are exposed to AI.

The second group, "Building a more resilient society," includes six projects focused on AI safety, risk measurement, information sharing, and tools for democratic oversight. Organizations taking part include the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit that works to reduce catastrophic security risks such as nuclear and biological threats.

Within the open-economy track, the eight projects study how tax codes may need to evolve as AI automates tasks, along with ownership models, benefits systems, and the distribution of AI-driven productivity gains.

The resilience-focused projects address risk measurement, information sharing among governments, companies, and researchers, and democratic oversight tools for AI systems that affect millions of people.

Scale and Timeline

The response of more than 400 proposals competing for 14 funded slots — a selection rate of under 4 percent — signals substantial demand within the research community for this type of funding, and OpenAI's API credits could meaningfully broaden the kinds of experiments the selected researchers are able to run.

The six-month timeline is compressed by academic standards, where multi-year studies are the norm. Whether that pace produces genuinely useful policy recommendations will be tested when the results arrive in 2027, a window in which governments in several of the same regions represented in the cohort — including the United States and the European Union — are already putting AI regulations into effect.