How to Use the Windfall Policy Atlas
Welcome to the Windfall Trust’s Policy Atlas!
This Atlas is intended as a resource for people seeking to understand how to guide societies through the upcoming economic transition – whether you’re an elected official, journalist, policymaker, or an interested reader. It’s intended to provide an overview of the wide range of policy interventions that could be used to respond to AI’s economic impacts.
The Atlas contains five broad policy categories:
Public & Social Investments
Support systems for citizens during economic disruption
Labor Market Adaptation
Helping workers and institutions adjust to AI
Wealth Capture
Ensuring AI generated wealth benefits society
Regulation & Market Design
Rules that shape AI markets and corporate
Global Coordination
International cooperation on AI impacts
Within each of the five categories there are a host of specific policy proposals – 48 in all. For example, within Wealth Capture, the Atlas covers a range of different tax proposals, from wealth taxes to consumption taxes. For each policy topic, we provide a lightweight summary, point towards current proposals and recommended readings, and give examples of real-world precedents. We’ve done our best to prioritize proposals that explicitly address the potential for AI economic disruption: however, we also include resources that discuss the policy from a more general lens when relevant.
The economic challenges posed by AI will vary significantly in scope and immediacy. Some impacts will arise as rapid economic shocks, creating uncertainty and displacing workers. Others will emerge over years as the economy structurally transitions to a new normal. There will be differing challenges on every level of society – from international coordination to local governments, from households to small businesses.
To make this Atlas easier to search and interpret, we’ve classified policies along five different axes. A “Policy Snapshot” is included on each policy page to capture these axes.
Policy Snapshot
Universal Basic Capital / Equity
Content
Rate of Disruption
Risk Horizon
Governance
Who It Affects
Decision Maker
These axes include:
Rate of Disruption
There is substantial uncertainty about the rate at which AI will transform the economy. To account for this, we classify policies into three buckets based on whether they are relevant for fast-moving or slower-moving scenarios:
Gradual: Policies for scenarios where AI adoption is relatively incremental and labor market disruption remains modest – job displacement occurs but is absorbed through normal market adjustment, and wage effects are limited.
All Scenarios: Policies that merit consideration regardless of how fast or severe AI's economic impact turns out to be.
Rapid: Policies designed for faster-moving scenarios where AI leads to significant wage declines, large-scale job displacement, or sharp increases in wealth concentration over a compressed timeframe.
Risk Horizon
We classify policies based on the timeframe and type of economic impacts that we expect them to be most effective, ranging from near-term shocks to long-term structural transformations:
Near-Term: Policies that respond to immediate shocks to household income, employment, and access to essential services. These respond to front-loaded risks such as sudden layoffs in AI-exposed sectors, wage cuts as firms restructure, or sudden gaps in social safety nets.
Medium-Term: Policies that support adjustment as occupations and sectors transition over a period of years. Risks arise from sustained reallocation pressure as certain job categories contract, sectors of the economy re-organize, and skill profiles change to meet new market demands.
Long-Term: Policies that address persistent structural changes to the economy once AI is broadly integrated such as wealth concentration, decoupling of productivity from wage growth, persistent underemployment, or the potential erosion of tax bases.
Governance
We classify policies based on whether they may be effective in a Subnational, National, or International scope.
Who It Affects
Policies may benefit parties (e.g. households) or regulate parties (e.g. AI firms), or have other tertiary effects. We classify policies based on the parties that may be directly affected, including: Workers, Households, Small Businesses, Creators & IP Holders, Global South, AI Developers, Firms, AI Infrastructure Providers, and Public Institutions.
Decision Maker
We classify policies by the actor with primary responsibility for implementation, including: Legislators, Regulatory Agencies, Multilateral Bodies, Courts, and the Private Sector.
We see this Atlas as the start of a conversation to help policymakers identify sets of policies that can respond effectively to a wide range of economic challenges arising from the diffusion of powerful AI systems. At launch, this includes roughly 48 policy ideas, which we believe should capture the bulk of the discussion in policy circles. But this is just a start – we plan to regularly update this Atlas and add new ideas as they emerge. If you have a proposal you would like to include, please share it with us in this form.
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