The first basic income for workers impacted by AI has begun sending out $1,000 monthly payments
The AI Dividend is distributing $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached, to up to 50 workers.
The first basic income program for workers who have lost pay, jobs, or opportunities to AI began sending out its first funds this week. The program is run by the AI Commons Project, which it’s administering what it calls the AI Dividend: a no-strings payment of $1,000 a month for a year, to a cohort of 25-50 impacted workers. The project’s organizers say they have $300,000 in initial funding, and hope to expand quickly. They plan to distribute $3 million in funds in 2026—and aim to do so by pushing the major AI companies to contribute to the effort.
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“Over the last few years, I’ve been mentoring students who have really struggled to land any jobs,” Kaitlin Cort, a veteran software engineer and programming instructor, tells me.
Cort is one of the organizers behind the AI Dividend, and she says she was alerted to a growing problem as she’s tried to find jobs for graduates of her programming classes. (She’s taught for Per Scholas, Future Code, and NYC Tech Talent Pipeline programs.) Cort says she’s seen the job market for entry level programmers dry up as executives and managers across the tech industry embrace Copilot and Claude. “The few jobs that students have landed have often been demeaning,” Cort says, “and not really allowing them to do real engineering work, but rather asking them to review repetitive tasks, and validate parts of code created by AI.”
The impact of AI on job loss, especially in tech and creative industries, is one of the most-debated subjects of the day. It’s a frequent topic here in the pages of Blood in the Machine, and is examined in particular in my AI Killed My Job project.
Whether or not executives and managers will use AI to replace human labor in the long-term, at a scale promised by AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who envision huge swaths of the workforce rendered obsolete, very much remains to be seen. These executives have a pointed interest in promoting that narrative. What is clear is that right now, tech firms from Amazon to Block to Salesforce to Meta to Duolingo are instituting layoffs and citing AI as the cause. And that across the nation, enough managers and clients are embracing AI-generated content that artists, writers, and translators are watching their incomes deteriorate.
And thanks to those mass layoffs in the tech industry, more of the scant available entry level jobs are now going to engineers with three or more years of experience, Cort says. So, already a member of the Tech Workers Coalition, Cort founded What We Will, a group aimed at “organizing workers across industries upended by rapid technological change to build collective power and win shared prosperity,” per the group’s website. What We Will, in turn, partnered with the Fund For a Guaranteed Income (F4GI), an established nonprofit that seeks to “prove a viable path to guaranteed income,” to launch a pilot project to that end: A $1,000-a-month basic income for workers whose jobs have been harmed by AI. Christened the AI Dividend, the program was designed with input from hundreds of workers, who shared their experiences with an online survey, and is funded by F4GI.
“Everyone tells workers to learn AI skills but ignores that it takes time, money and connections to do so,” Nick Salazar, the executive director of F4GI, tells me. “The AI Dividend combines cash with reskilling so workers can actually figure out what’s next. Our goal is to learn what actually helps workers in the AI economy.”
Applicants are being selected on a rolling basis. They’re assessed for eligibility by the AI Commons Project team, which oversees the dividend. If selected, workers will receive the $1,000 per month stipend through 2026 and into 2027. The project designers hope to gather data about the impact the funds have on workers as they push to expand the program.
“To be clear, our program is not only for tech workers,” Cort says. “We strongly focus on providing support for call center workers, copywriters and journalists, data annotation workers, creative workers, and other knowledge workers impacted by AI disruption.”
But since software engineering has been so heavily impacted, she says, and she saw so many of her own students struggling, with pressing needs, many initial recipients are low-income tech workers, aspiring software engineers who have been unable to find work, or tech workers who have been laid off and have not been able to find a job for over a year.
“We realized that financial stability during the job search is of critical importance if they are to continue pursuing the career path they have invested time and energy training for,” Cort tells me. “An initial recipient in our pilot program is unhoused and requires immediate assistance.”
Other pioneering groups have been formed to address AI’s impacts on work: The Stop GenAI mutual aid network focuses on acquiring aid for artists, academics, writers and creatives hit by AI, for one. But the AI Dividend appears to be the first pilot project to formalize a means of delivering predictable monthly no-strings direct payments to workers impacted by AI. In fact, workers like those in Stop GenAI’s membership would seem to make ideal candidates for the program.
The next step, Salazar says, is to press funders and the major AI companies to contribute and scale up the effort. Some AI industry employees have already contributed time and resources to the project, he says, and talks have been initiated with firms like Anthropic.
“We’re in active conversations with AI labs about long-term funding,” Salazar tells me. “Major AI CEOs say they believe in supporting displaced workers. Employees at AI companies have already stepped up to contribute time and expertise and we expect the companies will follow their lead. If they don’t, it raises the question of whether they’re serious about supporting workers.”
For a nonprofit aiming to fund a basic income project, this seems a shrewd strategy. AI CEOs, from Sam Altman to Elon Musk to Dario Amodei, have all at one point said there will be a need for a universal basic income because of the impact of their products on workers. And while there’s plenty of controversy around the very concept of a UBI—sharp critiques have been issued from the right; that the state shouldn’t pay for mass social support; and the left; that a monthly allowance on the order typically proposed would cement inequality and justify hollowing out other public institutions—I for one am curious to see if AI CEOS are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Even if the AI is successfully funded in the longer term, based on worker input and Cort and her colleagues’ experience in the field, part of the program may include finding pathways for workers and students to leave tech altogether, they say. “For some participants, we may need to recommend other career paths in healthcare or skilled trades, but we are trying our best to bridge the skill gap now required for entry-level workers,” Cort tells me.
Workers interested in learning more, sharing their experiences with on AI in the workplace with organizers, or participating in the program, can fill out this survey at the AI Commons Project. Eligible workers will then be contacted by members of the AI Dividend team.
“I don’t think this issue is going away anytime soon,” Cort says. “We have our work cut out for us.”
Who can get by on $1000 per month? My rent's more than twice that.
Very little thought or planning has gone into the "great AI changeover" being forced upon us. Short term gain and greed win again. It feels like we are being led to the cliff. The benefits of a UBI are well established, even when inadequate like a $1K. We are not lacking in ideas or pilot projects. We need a breakthrough to remind people of our shared humanity.
As far as the AI dividend, it should be paid for by the tehcbroligarchy who made their money off others' labors and are now causing a mass disruption. There is a lot of precedent for these "retraining" programs and cash benefits. They are usually government run.
There should be a Pigouvian Tax (the actual social cost) on these mega corporations, and to prevent that, they bought Trump. The impact of AI will ripple out in all directions, but especially the supply chain, the food chain, the consumer chain, and of course the environment. Without intervention, things are going to spiral even further. The cliff is just ahead.