AI Giants Put Up $500 Million to Retrain Displaced Workers

The companies building the systems most likely to disrupt American jobs have agreed to help pay for the cleanup. On June 25 a bipartisan nonprofit called RAISE US began operating with more than $500 million already committed, most of it from the largest names in artificial intelligence.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon are the anchor backers, joined by more than two dozen founding organizations including Bank of America, IBM, Mastercard, Eli Lilly, Cisco and General Motors. The Rockefeller, Ford and Walton foundations are supplying philanthropic support, and the group has set a longer-term goal of $1 billion. Fortune first reported the launch.

Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo runs the organization as chief executive, with former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb as her Republican co-chair. The advisory board reads like a cross-section of Washington and academia: former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, and the economists David Autor, Erik Brynjolfsson and Raj Chetty. Axios reported that the founders spent months courting both parties to keep the effort bipartisan.

What the money is meant to do

RAISE US plans to fund retraining, apprenticeships, career navigation and support for workers who lose jobs to automation. Its first state partnerships are in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah, where pilot programs include AI-assisted career guidance, wage insurance for people who take lower-paying work after a layoff, and short-time compensation designed to keep workers employed through a business transition.

The pitch is unusual because of who is funding it. Several of the anchor companies have spent the past year describing, sometimes celebrating, how much work their models can absorb. Oracle recently told regulators that AI was shrinking its workforce, and Anthropic's own economic research found that a sizable share of workers already believe AI can handle most of their day-to-day tasks. Critics will note the tidy circularity of the same firms bankrolling the safety net for the disruption they are accelerating.

Raimondo framed the effort in blunt terms. "If you want to lead the world in AI, you have to take action to make sure our democracy doesn't crumble," she said.

Whether $500 million is remotely enough is another question. The sum is large for a nonprofit and small against a labor market of more than 160 million people. For now RAISE US is a well-funded experiment in four states, and a test of whether industry money can soften a transition that industry is driving. It sits alongside a longer debate we have covered about how much AI will actually replace rather than assist.