"We Must Act Now" is an 88-word public statement released July 13, 2026 at wemustactnow.ai, organized through the Stanford Digital Economy Lab under Erik Brynjolfsson. It is deliberately minimal — three numbered propositions and no policy recommendations — in the pattern of the Center for AI Safety's 2023 extinction-risk statement, but addressed to economic transformation rather than to catastrophic risk.
Text
The statement's three propositions, in full:
- "AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years."
- "This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards."
- "Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society."
Every claim is hedged — "may become," "could drive," "could bring" — and the only unhedged verb is the call to act. The statement asserts neither a timeline nor a magnitude for displacement, and names no policy instrument. It commits its signatories to the proposition that the question warrants urgent attention, not to any answer.
Signatories
The site reported 1,649 total signatures at the time of retrieval on July 15, 2026, above a featured roster of roughly 240 names. Sixteen are Nobel laureates in economics: Michael Spence, Daron Acemoglu, Joseph Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, Christopher Pissarides, Paul Milgrom, George Akerlof, Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt, Oliver Hart, Bengt Holmström, Alvin Roth, Michael Kremer, Roger Myerson, Paul Krugman, and Ben Bernanke.
What distinguishes the roster is its breadth across positions that normally disagree. The economics of AI-driven displacement is a live dispute — Acemoglu's modest productivity-growth estimates against scenarios in which output doubles while wages collapse — and both poles signed. So did figures on opposing sides of the AI-risk debate: Yoshua Bengio, Max Tegmark, Dan Hendrycks, and Jaan Tallinn alongside Yann LeCun, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Arvind Narayanan, whose normal-technology framing rejects the transformation premise's usual accompaniments. The minimalism of the text is what makes that range possible.
Frontier labs are represented in their research and policy capacities rather than institutionally: from Anthropic, Jack Clark, Anton Korinek (jointly with the University of Virginia), Sholto Douglas, Peter McCrory, Maxim Massenkoff, Zoë Hitzig, Nathan Wilmers, Johannes Hermle, Eva Lyubich, and Szymon Sacher; from OpenAI, Wojciech Zaremba (OpenAI Foundation), Ronnie Chatterji, Dean Ball, Boaz Barak (jointly with Harvard), Noam Brown, and CFO Sarah Friar; from Google, Jeff Dean and Michiel Bakker (jointly with MIT); plus John Schulman of Thinking Machines. Also signing: Daniel Kokotajlo of the AI Futures Project, Tom Cunningham and Parker Whitfill of METR, Tom Davidson of the Forethought Center for AI Strategy, Sam Manning of GovAI, Stephanie Bell and Rebecca Finlay of Partnership on AI, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, Justin Bullock of Americans for Responsible Innovation, and Gina Raimondo of RAISE US.
Industry and investment signatories include Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, Jerry Yang, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Howard, Oren Etzioni, and Glen Weyl. Anders Sandberg, Rob Reich, Daniel Susskind, Gillian Hadfield, Niall Ferguson, Jason Furman, Olivier Blanchard, Gita Gopinath, Lawrence Katz, Nicholas Bloom, Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Marianne Bertrand sign from academic economics and adjacent fields; David Autor and Pascual Restrepo, whose work anchors much of the displacement literature, also appear.
Reading
The statement's function is coalition-formation rather than argument. Its second proposition contains the only substantive claim — that the transformation could be larger than the Industrial Revolution over a vastly shorter time frame — and pairs displacement risk with living-standards gains in the same sentence, so that neither the optimistic nor the pessimistic reading can claim the text alone. Its third proposition addresses economists first, ahead of policymakers and technology leaders, and its first named task is "to understand the economics of transformative AI," placing a research gap before a policy gap.
For the wiki's purposes it is evidence about the state of expert opinion — specifically, that a claim about the scale of potential economic transformation now commands assent across the Acemoglu–Korinek range and across the safety-versus-normal-technology divide — rather than evidence about AI's economic effects, on which it takes no position. See AI Labor Disruption, AI and Productivity.
Provenance
Retrieved from wemustactnow.ai, the statement's own site. The gap-identifier verified it on 2026-07-15 against AP News coverage, a PR Newswire release ("Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers"), The Well News, and Poets&Quants — all dating the statement to July 13, 2026 and attributing organization to the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. The signatory roster reflects the site as of the July 15 pull and will have grown since.
Relationships
- supports: AI Labor Disruption — evidence of expert consensus on the scale of potential disruption, not on its magnitude or timing
- related: Anthropic's Economic Policy Framework (June 2026) — a policy answer to the question this statement declines to answer; several Anthropic signatories overlap
- related: AI and Productivity, Compressed 21st Century, AI Political Economy
- related: Erik Brynjolfsson (organizer), Daron Acemoglu, Joseph Stiglitz, Yoshua Bengio