An open letter signed by more than 200 economists and artificial intelligence researchers — among them 16 Nobel laureates and senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — warns that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but unfolding “over a vastly shorter time frame.” Released on Monday, the statement urges governments and industry leaders to build “the incentives, guardrails, and institutions” needed to steer the technology toward broad social benefit and to manage risks including large-scale job displacement. The intervention marks a rare alignment between academic economists and the companies building the most advanced AI systems.

The letter’s organisers, anchored by Stanford University’s digital economy lab, argue that previous technological shifts gave societies decades to adapt, whereas AI may allow only a few years. Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia professor who joined Anthropic’s economic research team in March, said waiting for certainty means acting too late. The call reflects a growing body of evidence: a PwC global barometer published this year found that the 20% of firms with the highest AI adoption had achieved average productivity growth of 163% since 2018, while the skills required in AI-exposed roles are evolving more than twice as fast as in other occupations. At the same time, the rapid, often ungoverned spread of generative AI tools inside companies — what Brazilian governance specialists term “shadow AI” — is creating new vectors of operational and regulatory risk, with the Gartner group projecting that more than 80% of organisations will have faced incidents related to ungoverned AI use by the end of 2026.

Viewed from São Paulo, the debate is already reshaping corporate strategy and labour markets. Brazilian firms are deploying autonomous AI agents that plan and execute multi-step tasks in finance and legal operations, while recruiters report that demand has shifted toward professionals who combine technical skills with adaptability and business acumen. A survey of young people in São Paulo state found that although most see AI as an ally in the job search, only one in three believes they have received adequate preparation to use it. In Hollywood, the announcement that an AI-generated character named Tilly Norwood will star in a feature film has forced an uncomfortable conversation about what constitutes an actor and who deserves credit for a performance, exposing fault lines that mirror the wider economic anxiety.

The letter’s signatories — including OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Google DeepMind’s chief scientist and the co-founder of Anthropic — insist that the response cannot be improvised mid-transformation. Their statement adds weight to a growing international push for binding regulatory frameworks, moving beyond voluntary industry pledges. With several AI safety summits scheduled for the second half of 2026, the focus is shifting from whether to regulate to how to design institutions that can keep pace with a technology that, as the letter warns, may become radically more powerful within a decade.