Economics of Transformative AI

The Economics of Transformative AI (EconTAI) Initiative is a research center at the University of Virginia, launched in September 2025 with support from the College of Arts and Sciences. It is led by Professor Anton Korinek, who serves as Faculty Director, alongside UVA economists Basil Halperin and Lee Lockwood. The initiative describes itself as the first dedicated research center focused on understanding and preparing the economy for AI systems that may soon match or exceed human-level intelligence. EconTAI's mission is to produce and disseminate cutting-edge economic research that helps society navigate the transition to transformative AI, with a vision of a world in which transformative AI expands prosperity and human flourishing. The initiative pursues five strategic objectives: research excellence, education and field building, policy translation, public understanding, and innovation in methods. Its proximity to Washington, DC enables direct policy engagement. The initiative grew out of years of research by Korinek and collaborators. Korinek previously served as Economics of AI Lead at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) and developed a free Coursera course on the Economics of AI, supported by the EA Long-Term Future Fund. Together with Ajay Agrawal (University of Toronto) and Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford), Korinek co-organized the NBER Economics of Transformative AI Workshop held at Stanford in September 2025, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft, and co-edited the NBER conference volume "The Economics of Transformative AI" forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in September 2026. Korinek and his collaborators have proposed a research agenda organized around nine Grand Challenges: economic growth, innovation, income distribution, decision-making power, geoeconomics, information flows, safety risks, human well-being, and transition dynamics. Key research outputs include working papers on explosive growth from automating AI research, public finance in the age of AI, scenarios for the transition to AGI, and economic growth under transformative AI. Korinek has been widely recognized for this work, including being named to TIME's 2025 TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence, selected for Vox's Future Perfect 50 list, appointed to the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council, and selected as one of a handful of experts to deliver a report to G7 nations on AI's economic effects. He holds affiliations as a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Research Associate at the NBER, and Research Fellow at the CEPR. EconTAI has collaborated with the International Monetary Fund on a workshop examining global economic and financial implications of AI, and with the Windfall Trust on scenario planning exercises.