OpenAI released a thirteen-page document on April 6 called "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age." Twenty specific proposals. Robot taxes. A public wealth fund modelled on Alaska's Permanent Fund. Government-backed pilots of a thirty-two-hour workweek at full pay. Automatic benefit triggers when AI displacement hits preset thresholds. Portable healthcare and retirement that follow workers between jobs instead of binding them to one employer.

The framing is New Deal. The language is Progressive Era. Altman told Axios that large tax system changes are "in the Overton window, but near the edges." The document reads like it was written by people who believe superintelligence is imminent and want to be remembered as the ones who tried to warn everyone.

The problem is who wrote it. OpenAI is the largest developer of the technology it warns about, a newly for-profit company preparing an IPO north of $800 billion, and a political actor whose Leading the Future PAC has lobbied against AI safety legislation in practice. Nathan Calvin at Encode AI documented opposition to New York's RAISE Act and alleged intimidation during California's SB 53 debate. The company proposing auditing regimes for frontier models is the same company fighting the audits.

Anton Leicht at the Carnegie Endowment called it "comms work to provide cover for regulatory nihilism." Lucia Velasco at the Inter-American Development Bank noted that OpenAI is "one of the least neutral parties in this ongoing discussion." Soribel Feliz, a former Senate AI policy advisor, said the ideas are not new. They have been the framework for every governance conversation since ChatGPT launched in 2022.

Then there is the timing. The document dropped on the same day The New Yorker published an investigation into Altman's leadership based on over a hundred interviews and internal documents, alleging systematic deprioritisation of safety commitments. A coincidence of scheduling, presumably.

The economics face pressure from a different direction. A Brookings paper by Anton Korinek and Lee Lockwood argues that taxing AI infrastructure is like taxing steel during the industrial revolution. Consumption-based approaches (digital services taxes, token taxes on AI output) would generate revenue without discouraging exactly the investment OpenAI asks the government to fast-track in the same document.

Some of the proposals are genuinely worth studying. A public wealth fund has precedent. Portable benefits address a real structural weakness. Automatic safety net triggers are smart mechanism design. But policy authored by the entity most incentivised to shape its own oversight is lobbying dressed in academic prose. White-collar payrolls have contracted for twenty-nine consecutive months. The entry-level pipeline keeps hollowing out. The people losing those jobs did not publish a thirteen-page blueprint. They just lost the job.

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