A universal basic income to help the thousands of people who have been laid off or who cannot find work due to AI? Well, although it may sound like “communism” to certain political spectrums, it is a real proposal in the U.S.: it has come into effect this week, although the number of beneficiaries is still limited.
The program is aimed at workers who have lost their wages, their jobs, or their opportunities due to AI, according to the newsletter Blood in the Machine. Called “AI Dividend,” it is managed by the nonprofit organizations AI Commons Project and What We Will, whose goal is to support people in an increasingly AI-centered world.
3 million dollars in 2026 as a pilot project
AI Dividend offers an unconditional payment of 1,000 dollars a month for a year to between 25 and 50 workers affected by AI. The organizers claim to have 300,000 dollars in initial funding. The goal is to distribute 3 million dollars in funds by 2026, an ambitious target they hope to achieve by pressuring AI companies to contribute to the program, which sounds easier said than done.
One of the organizers of the program, veteran software engineer Kaitlin Cort, stated that the magnitude of the AI problem became evident when trying to find jobs for the graduates of her programming classes.
Cort claims that he has seen how the job market for beginner programmers has dried up as executives and managers across the tech sector adopt AI programming assistants powered by Microsoft’s Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude.
“The few jobs that students have managed to get are often degrading,” Cort states, “and they do not really allow them to perform engineering work; instead, they are asked to review repetitive tasks and validate parts of code created by AI.”
A person who is, or was, a supporter of universal basic income is Sam Altman. The director of OpenAI stated that, in 2016, he began to realize the effects that advanced AI could have on society, especially on employment, and he conducted an experiment aimed at demonstrating that UBI could counteract some of these problems. That program provided 1,000 people with $1,000 a month, while a control group of 2,000 was given $50 a month.
Altman’s study ultimately concluded that periodic cash payments gave people more flexibility and allowed them to spend more on basic needs such as food and housing, while only slightly reducing work hours. However, it did not significantly improve physical health or long-term financial stability.
In 2024, Altman stated that the UBI could be replaced by what he calls universal basic computing. “Everyone receives a share of the computing power of GPT-7 and can use it, resell it, or donate it to someone for cancer research,” suggested Altman.
In August 2025, Miles Brundage, who was a senior policy advisor at OpenAI and head of the general AI (AGI) preparedness team until 2024, argued that AI-driven growth could raise the UBI to $10,000 a month.
One of the pioneers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, also believes that these payments will be necessary due to job losses related to AI, although the director of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, thinks that distributing money will not be enough to address the problem.
