Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age

OpenAI has waded into territory usually left to think tanks and economists, publishing what it's calling an industrial policy framework for what the company terms the Intelligence Age. The pitch is short on legislative specifics but long on ambition: expand opportunity, share prosperity, and build institutions sturdy enough to survive the disruption that increasingly capable AI systems are expected to bring.

The framing matters more than any single proposal here. OpenAI isn't just asking governments to regulate AI safely, the usual request. It's asking them to actively manage the economic transition, the way past administrations approached rail, electrification, or the interstate highway system. That's a notable shift in posture from a company that, not long ago, mostly wanted policymakers to stay out of its way.

There's an obvious self-interest angle. If AI labs want to keep training ever-larger models without political backlash, they need a public that believes the wealth generated will trickle down rather than concentrate. Framing this as industrial policy, rather than corporate responsibility, lets OpenAI push the conversation toward government programs, tax incentives, and infrastructure spending, tools that spread both the cost and the credit far beyond Sam Altman's building in San Francisco.

What's missing from the announcement is anything close to a mechanism. No numbers on job displacement, no proposed funding source, no timeline. It reads more like an opening bid in a negotiation with Washington than a finished policy paper. Given how fast frontier model capabilities have moved this year, that vagueness might be deliberate, better to stake a claim on being at the table now than to lock into specifics that age poorly in six months.