Windfall Trust is a research organization concerned with how the economic gains from advanced AI are distributed. Its published work tracked here covers labor-transition policy sequencing and the institutional design of redistribution; it runs an AGI Social Contract workstream and co-publishes an AI Economics Brief.
Activities and positions
Labor-transition sequencing. Deric Cheng, the organization's Director of Research and lead for AGI Social Contract, and Jacob Schaal, an economist at King's College London and co-editor of the AI Economics Brief, argued in June 2026 that the standing disagreement between the normal-technology and great-displacer camps is better read as a disagreement about timing: the two describe sequential, overlapping phases of one transition rather than rival accounts of the present (A Roadmap for the Upcoming Labor Transition (Cheng & Schaal, June 2026)).
The associated claim is that policy instruments are phase-specific and cumulative — active labor-market policy and wage insurance in the near term, taxation reform, industrial policy, and pro-worker AI in the medium term, and predistributed capital, sovereign wealth funds, and universal basic services in the long term — with each stage's administrative machinery a prerequisite for the next. They decline to offer a universal prescription, holding that interventions "will differ dramatically on a country-by-country basis." See AI Labor Disruption, AI Public Wealth Fund and Government Equity in AI.
Windfall Trust staff — Danny Buerkli, Anna Yelizarova, and Adrian Brown — are among the signatories of "We Must Act Now" (July 2026).
Relationships
- supports: A Roadmap for the Upcoming Labor Transition (Cheng & Schaal, June 2026) — authors' institutional affiliation
- related: AI Labor Disruption, AI Public Wealth Fund and Government Equity in AI, AI Political Economy, We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy (July 2026)