OpenAI calls for ‘tax on automated labour’ as it sounds alarm on economic risks

OpenAI has called for a tax on automated labour as the firm laid bare the scale of the structural risks to the global economy that could be wrought by the rise in artificial intelligence.

In a wide-ranging set of proposals in a paper described as “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age”, the ChatGPT maker called for major economies to reduce their reliance on income and other payroll-based taxes in favour of greater taxes on corporations and capital gains.

The paper called for “increasing reliance on capital-based revenues” including greater taxes on profits and “targeted measures on sustained AI-driven returns” including a tax on automated labour.

OpenAI said the reforms should be paired with wage-linked incentives that encourage firms to retain and retrain workers, in a bid to soften the blow of widening unemployment that could come as a consequence of more and more jobs being automated.

“While we strongly believe that AI’s benefits will far outweigh its challenges, we are clear-eyed about the risks—of jobs and entire industries being disrupted; bad actors misusing the technology; misaligned systems evading human control; governments or institutions deploying AI in ways that undermine democratic values; and power and wealth becoming more concentrated instead of more widely shared,” OpenAI said.

“We should be clear-eyed about the resilience required here. These new risks won’t be isolated or suitable for addressing one at a time—AI will reshape how work is performed, how decisions are made, how organizations operate, and how states interact. Building resilience therefore means making sure people and institutions can adapt quickly, maintain meaningful agency over how these systems are used, and preserve broadly shared prosperity even as economic and social structures evolve.”

Reliance on payroll taxes

The tax suggestions, which form part of a sweeping set of proposals spanning 13 pages, could be construed as an attempt by OpenAI to show that potential damage to the economy from advances in AI can be mitigated through government changes to fiscal policy, amid growing fears of AI sparking a wave of high unemployment across the developed world.

OpenAI’s proposals, if introduced, would mark a dramatic change to the way most governments in advanced economies collect taxes. In the UK, almost half of all government tax receipts are collected from income tax and national insurance, while only around 11 per cent comes from corporation tax and around 4 per cent comes from capital gains tax.

Over the past two years, Labour has increased the government’s reliance on payroll-based taxes, by freezing the income tax threshold until the end of the parliament and reducing the threshold at employer national insurance is paid, in a set of measures designed to raise tens of billions in extra receipts for the exchequer.

“History shows that democratic societies can respond to technological upheaval with ambition: reimagining the social contract, mediating between capital and labor, and encouraging broad distribution of the benefits of technological progress while preserving pluralism, constitutional checks and balances, and freedom to innovate,” OpenAI said.

“The transition to superintelligence will require an even more ambitious form of industrial policy, one that reflects the ability of democratic societies to act collectively, at scale, to shape their economic future so that superintelligence benefits everyone.”