New policy ideas for the Intelligence Age

OpenAI is awarding grants to 14 projects led by independent organizations to promote economic opportunity and societal resilience as AI advances. The grants follow through on a commitment we made when we published Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age in April 2026: to support others in testing, challenging, and building on the ideas we put forward to ensure that advanced AI benefits everyone.

AI is quickly becoming more capable, with the potential to transform how people learn, create, and participate in the economy. Its reach is also expanding: ChatGPT is used by 1 billion people around the world, across geographies, income levels, and demographic groups. Users span every major age group; we have more adult users both under and over the age of 30 than any other frontier lab.

But broad access to the technology is only part of the equation. Whether AI ultimately serves the many rather than the few will also depend on the choices societies make about how to deploy it and distribute its benefits. If the benefits of the Intelligence Age are going to be broadly shared, the policy response needs to be as ambitious as the technological change itself—and that means calling for new approaches rather than adjustments to existing policy.

Nuclear Threat Initiative: Designing Cross-Border Information-Sharing for AIxBio Risk. NTI | bio will test the legal feasibility for secure international sharing of AI capabilities, risks, and mitigations. NTI | bio will then design a basic information-sharing architecture to enhance international AIxBio safety and security.

Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada: Building Resilient Research in the Intelligence Age. IMPA will study what research institutions need to turn AI access into meaningful scientific progress, including engineering support, training, governance, compute, and local infrastructure. Working with mathematicians in Brazil, it will develop a transferable measurement and cost framework, practical guidance for trustworthy AI use in mathematics, and a public report evaluating the Right to AI and distributed scientific discovery.

Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo: People-First AI Clinical Infrastructure for Public Hospitals. HCFMUSP will conduct a controlled, pre-deployment evaluation of an AI-enabled clinical information infrastructure prototype designed to organize clinical information in Brazil’s Unified Health System, SUS. Using only synthetic or appropriately de-identified data, the project will assess whether people-first clinical AI can reduce fragmented record review, improve clinician workflows, support evidence-based care and risk stratification processes, and help patients navigate health services, manage prescription-renewal workflows, and identify warning symptoms that should be escalated for clinician review, while preserving physician judgment and human oversight.

These choices should not be made by technology companies alone. In democratic societies, they should be shaped through democratic institutions and public debate. Independent research and policy organizations play an especially important role: they can develop and test new approaches, challenge assumptions—including ours—and serve as laboratories for ideas that governments can adapt to their own communities and circumstances.

Through these new grants, researchers and practitioners will turn high-level ideas into concrete work, examining what could work, what it might cost, and how approaches could be implemented responsibly. More than 400 people and organizations responded to our call for proposals. Applicants identified an idea and proposed projects that could meaningfully contribute to public understanding and policy development. OpenAI will provide a total of $1 million in funding and up to $1 million in API credits across the selected projects.

The projects span the United States, the European Union, Brazil, Singapore, and South Korea and address two broad questions: how AI can broaden economic opportunity, and how societies can build resilience as capabilities advance. Some will produce research and policy models, while others will build prototypes, datasets, and frameworks that can be tested in practice. Summaries of the selected projects are included below.