Nobody Asked the Worker
Nobody asked the receptionist in Cleveland whether she agreed to let a sovereign fund manage her future. Nobody asked the Uber driver in Phoenix whether he preferred a robot tax or a job. Nobody asked the elementary school teacher in Oaxaca, reading the news two days late in translation, whether the New Deal for artificial intelligence included a seat for her. Sam Altman published thirteen pages on how to reorganize society. He published them on a Monday. By Tuesday they were doctrine.
The document is called "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First." Thirteen pages. OpenAI published it on April sixth, two thousand twenty-six, not as an academic paper or an internal memo but as a public manifesto. Sam Altman, the chief executive of the most valuable company in the sector, compared the current moment to the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and the New Deal of the nineteen-thirties. He did not choose those comparisons at random. The Progressive Era was born because industrial capitalism had broken the workers until the workers answered back. The New Deal was born because the economy collapsed and someone had to rebuild the social contract from the rubble. Altman is saying, out loud, with his name and the letterhead of his company, that we are there again.
The most radical proposal is the Public Wealth Fund. It works like this: every artificial intelligence company whose market capitalization exceeds a certain threshold would be required to issue two point five percent of its annual valuation in new shares. Those shares would feed a national fund. The fund would invest in diversified assets, not just technology, and distribute dividends to every American citizen. Every single one. Not just those with a stockbroker. Not just those who understand what a token is. The word the document uses is "universal." OpenAI, valued at more than eight hundred billion dollars after closing a one-hundred-ten-billion-dollar round, would pay first. Altman is proposing to tax his own company. That, at least, deserves a pause.
Then come the automated labor taxes. The reasoning is as follows: if artificial intelligence replaces workers, wages cease to exist. If wages cease to exist, payroll taxes cease to exist. If payroll taxes cease to exist, Social Security and Medicare lose their funding. Altman says it plainly. He proposes shifting the tax base from labor to capital, to corporate profits, and to automated work. A robot tax. Not as a slogan. As fiscal architecture.
The four-day work week appears as an "efficiency dividend." The idea is that if artificial intelligence doubles productivity, that productivity should not convert exclusively into shareholder profit. It should also convert into time for the worker. Thirty-two hours at full pay. Altman proposes that governments fund pilot programs with companies and unions. It is an elegant proposal. It is also a proposal that only someone who has never depended on overtime to make rent can afford to make.
What should concern us most is the section on containment. The document acknowledges, in technical language but without ambiguity, that scenarios exist in which a dangerous artificial intelligence system cannot be easily recalled because it will be autonomous and capable of replicating itself. The most powerful company in the sector just published a protocol for when artificial intelligence escapes human control. It did not say "if." It said "when." It proposes containment playbooks coordinated across government agencies, as though describing a nuclear spill or a pandemic. You should read that section twice. You should read it slowly. The first time it is striking. The second time it is terrifying.