2 June 2026 · An open letter to

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei

Dear Sam, dear Dario,

You are building the most consequential technology in human history.

Over the next decade, the systems coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic may create wealth on a scale never before seen. Not merely billions. Not merely trillions. If frontier AI fulfils even a fraction of its promise, global output may rise tenfold, and perhaps far more. Some believe a hundredfold increase in productive capacity is possible.

You know this. The market knows this. The world’s eight billion people are starting to know it too.

We are writing, while there is still time, to ask how that wealth will be shared.

Frontier AI is not being built from nothing. It is built from humanity’s writing, code, art, conversation, music, science, medicine, law and history — the accumulated work of every generation that came before us. It is trained on a corpus that belongs, in any honest accounting, to humanity as a whole.

We are also clear-eyed about what is coming for human work.

If AI can do the work of doctors, lawyers, teachers, analysts, engineers, designers, administrators, drivers, factory workers and carers, then billions of people may soon have no reliable way to exchange their labour, skill or knowledge for income. The prosperity may be real. The productive capacity may be astonishing. But unless people are taken along, that prosperity will arrive as fear, insecurity and dispossession.

Pope Leo XIV recently warned: “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” That is exactly the question now before us. We do not believe danger is the whole story. Abundance can come hand in hand with disruption, and the abundance can be extraordinary. But abundance that flows only to founders, employees, investors and shareholders is not abundance. It is concentration on a scale that no society has ever survived intact.

We are not asking you to slow down. We are not asking governments to confiscate. We are asking for a fair settlement, made now, before the new economy is locked in.

We ask, specifically, that OpenAI and Anthropic each place twenty-five per cent of fully diluted equity into an irrevocable global trust. The same commitment should bind any future company of comparable global importance, including any successor that displaces OpenAI or Anthropic through a future technological breakthrough.

Equity in that trust is to be divided equally among every human being alive on 1 January 2027 — an estimated 8.3 billion people — one share each, in perpetuity.

The share cannot be sold, traded, inherited, accumulated, speculated on, or captured by governments, corporations, lawyers or financial intermediaries. It is theirs by virtue of being human.

The dividend should be paid in kind wherever possible: as AI access, compute, education, healthcare support, legal aid, translation, productivity tools and other direct benefits that change people’s lives.

No human being should pay a transaction fee to receive their share or basic dividend. Administrative costs, where unavoidable, should be transparent, minimal, independently audited, and never deducted from the poorest first.

This must be an equaliser from the bottom up.

Where national systems are needed to distribute benefits, the burden should fall on states and institutions, not ordinary people. If any contribution is ever required, it should fall only on the wealthiest groups in each country, never on those with the least.

The future you are building may increase the size of the human economy beyond recognition. That is precisely why the settlement must be made before the value is captured, before the gate closes, and before billions are told that the world has become richer while they have become economically unnecessary.

We are one humanity.

No border, government, company or bureaucracy should stand between a human being and their equal share in the age of artificial intelligence.

One human. One share.

If AI is trained on humanity, humanity deserves equity.

Signed,

The undersigned of the world.