Deadline: July 5, 2026
Applications are open for the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange 2026. OpenAI’s Economic Research team studies how AI is affecting workers, firms, institutions, and the broader economy. They do this by combining rigorous economic research with privacy-preserving analysis of product and usage data, customer and institutional partnerships, and collaboration with external researchers.
They are launching the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange to formalize and expand their collaborations with external researchers. The Exchange will support carefully scoped collaborations with researchers to produce high-quality empirical research on the economic impacts of AI.
They are looking for projects that begin with an important economic question about AI, then make a clear case for how data about the use of OpenAI tools can provide a distinctive, empirical lens on that question while also preserving user privacy.
Benefits
Each selected project will receive:
- A one-time research grant for the principal investigator(s): $25,000
- A monthly RA stipend or contractor compensation: $7,500
- Access to approved, privacy-safe product and usage data under NDA, subject to data governance, privacy, legal, and security requirements.
- Defined internal support path for project scoping, onboarding, data approvals, review, and dissemination.
Eligibility
- Open to researchers interested in Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Funded projects must include clear intermediate milestones, not just final papers. At a minimum, researchers will be expected to:
- Define key milestones tied to the project timeline, such as design lock, data access, interim analysis, and draft output.
- Complete onboarding, contracting, and approved data-access steps before analysis begins.
- Share intermediate findings with the OpenAI Economic Research team.
- Participate in periodic research read-outs or consortium discussions.
- Produce at least one written output, such as a memo, working paper, draft publication, public brief, benchmark, or dataset documentation.
- Coordinate external communication or publication through the agreed OpenAI review path.
Evaluation Criteria
Proposals will be evaluated based on:
- Relevance to the Economic Research team’s priority questions
- Methodological rigor and credibility
- Feasibility given project scope, data, privacy, legal, and timeline constraints (for instance: we will not under any circumstances be sharing conversation data)
- Clarity of milestones and reporting plans
- Fit with the Exchange operating model, including who will perform the hands-on work
- Potential to contribute to credible external evidence on the economic impacts of AI
- Potential to use approved OpenAI data in innovative, privacy-preserving ways
They will prioritize proposals from:
- Researchers that have a prior track record of publication in the research areas which they are proposing
- Researchers that have access to unique data that would facilitate ambitious collaborations
Application
Each proposal should include:
- Research question(s) and motivation
- Fit with one or more Exchange priority questions
- Proposed methodology and empirical strategy
- Data needs, including the specific approved OpenAI tool-use signal that would help answer the broader AI question and how the design would preserve privacy
- Target timeline and key milestones
- Research team and proposed RA or visiting researcher profile
- Expected contributions to evidence, internal learning, and approved public communication
- Scope definition, including explicit in-scope and out-of-scope analyses, outputs, geographies, and stakeholders
- Success criteria, failure conditions, dependencies, constraints, and resource commitments
For more information, visit OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.
