OpenAI publishes 'economic blueprint' for AI policy

OpenAI published “AI in America: OpenAI’s Economic Blueprint,” a policy document arguing that federal and state governments should treat AI infrastructure as a strategic priority comparable to interstate highways or the electrical grid. Its centrepiece proposal was a network of “AI Economic Zones” — sites where state and local governments would fast-track permitting for power generation, from wind and solar to nuclear, and data centre construction, in exchange for a share of the resulting compute being made available to public universities and research hubs aligned with regional industries.

The document proposed linking these zones through a “National AI Infrastructure Highway” connecting regional power and communications networks, and argued the case partly on financial urgency: it cited roughly $175 billion in private capital it said was sitting ready for AI infrastructure investment, contingent on faster government approval processes. It also called for export of what it termed the “American AI stack” — chips, models and cloud services — to allied nations, framed explicitly as a way to keep those countries’ AI infrastructure built on US rather than Chinese technology.

OpenAI followed the document with a Washington event later in January, timed to the transition to the incoming Trump administration. The blueprint sat alongside similar advocacy from Anthropic and the wider industry for federal action on power and permitting, and its emphasis on speed over new regulatory obligations distinguished it from the safety-focused policy asks OpenAI and others had made under the Biden administration.