Some of the biggest names in tech and AI are behind a new organization with ambitious plans to help workers navigate the AI transition.
The OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are all “anchor partners” on Raise US, a new nonprofit that aims to raise $1 billion to build a national platform to advise governors on how best to prepare their workforces for AI disruption. According to the organization, they have already raised $500 million. (The OpenAI Foundation was a nonprofit created as part of OpenAI’s restructuring, which holds a $100 billion equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm.)
“America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition. It does not yet have a people strategy — and we cannot lead without one,” former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is leading the group, said in a statement announcing the initiative.
Raise US’ initial partnerships are with Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah, an even split between states run by Republican and Democratic governors.
“By working directly with state governments to pilot and scale new workforce models, we can move faster and reach more people than any of us could independently,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer, wrote in a post explaining the partnership.
In Arkansas, the group is working with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to stand up an “AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas LAUNCH that connects students and job seekers to personalized learning and employer-linked career pathways.”
In Maryland, Raise US is working with Gov. Wes Moore to expand service-years for recent high school graduates into fields such as healthcare and education.
Of the initial group, Utah may be one of the most interesting. The state has found itself at the center of backlash over the buildout of AI data centers. Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary scaled back his proposed data center by nearly half after intense public backlash and political pressure.
The organization said more states will join in the coming months. Elsewhere, Raise US said it wants to work on “real-world pilots” for policies like “short-time compensation and wage insurance.”
Raimondo, who was governor of Rhode Island before joining the Biden administration, is leading the effort alongside former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. David Sze, a partner at Greylock, is among the four people who will serve on the organization’s board of directors.
In addition to the AI partners, the Raise US advisory board includes a who’s who of Corporate America, politics, labor, philanthropy, and economics, including Laurene Powell Jobs, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Bank of America co-President Jim DeMare, former IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, and renowned economist Raj Chetty.
The extent to which AI will disrupt the labor market is hotly contested. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been outspoken in his warnings that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next 1 to 5 years.
AI and tech CEOs have recently sought to pivot away from the job “apocalypse” discussion amid concerns that the rhetoric has fueled AI’s declining popularity in the US. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to say he was “delighted to be wrong about this.”
“I thought that there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar work jobs being eliminated by now than it’s actually happened,” Altman said during a May event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
