As anxiety about AI's effect on jobs builds, a high-profile, bipartisan effort is trying to get ahead of it.

What Raise US is

Raise US is a new nonprofit co-founded by Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary in the Biden administration, and Eric Holcomb, the Republican former governor of Indiana, with Raimondo as chief executive. It launched June 25 with more than $500 million in commitments from companies and philanthropies and a stated target of $1 billion in multi-year pledges, according to the group's announcement. Anchor partners span the corporate spectrum — Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Mastercard, AMD, Bank of America, General Motors, UPS, Cisco, Eli Lilly, the Rockefeller Foundation and AI labs including the OpenAI Foundation and Anthropic, Fortune reported. (Anthropic is the maker of this publication's AI tools; we note it as one of many backers.)

The problem it targets

Raimondo has framed the stakes bluntly, warning of unemployment severe enough to "destabilize our country and our democracy." The group cites estimates that AI could affect as many as 25 million U.S. jobs within five years — a striking figure, though one the group attributes to outside research and that economists caution is speculative given how fast the technology is moving. The concern isn't purely hypothetical: California this week launched the first state dashboard tracking AI-related unemployment claims, which found sustained increases among workers in high-AI-exposure roles in the San Francisco Bay Area after ChatGPT's late-2022 debut.

How it would work

Rather than route through Washington, Raise US will work with state governments, running pilots in four politically diverse states — Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah. Its planned tools include AI-powered career-navigation services, wage insurance (which tops up pay for workers pushed into lower-paying roles), short-time compensation to avert layoffs, and incentives — including proposed tax breaks — to reward employers that retrain rather than replace staff. The organization is launching lean, with a staff of about 15.

The skeptics

Large-scale retraining has a discouraging track record, and the group's own backers underline the tension: the same AI companies whose products drive displacement are helping fund the fix. Decades of evaluations of U.S. workforce programs — from the Job Training Partnership Act to Trade Adjustment Assistance — have often found small or short-lived gains in employment and earnings, the Brookings Institution has documented. Researchers point to structural barriers: too few good jobs at the targeted skill levels, the difficulty of reaching workers who can't pause earning to train, and the near-impossibility of predicting which skills will be in demand before the training pipelines are built.

Why it matters

Raise US is a bet that workforce policy is better run as a state-level, public-private effort than as a federal program or a new tax on AI — alternatives floated by figures from Senator Bernie Sanders to AI executives. Whether $500 million, or even $1 billion, can move the needle against displacement projected in the millions is an open question; the U.S. workforce numbers roughly 168 million. What the launch signals is harder to dismiss: prominent figures from both parties, alongside the largest technology companies, now publicly accept that the disruption is coming — and that today's safety net isn't built for it.