The Windfall Clause: Distributing the Benefits of AI for the Common Good

TL;DR

This paper proposes the Windfall Clause, a legal commitment for AI companies to donate large profits from transformative breakthroughs to benefit society and mitigate AI deployment risks.

Contribution

It introduces the Windfall Clause as an innovative institutional mechanism to ensure AI profits benefit the public and address social responsibilities.

Findings

The Windfall Clause can incentivize responsible AI development.

Legal commitments can align corporate profits with societal benefits.

Potential for widespread adoption in AI governance frameworks.

Abstract

As the transformative potential of AI has become increasingly salient as a matter of public and political interest, there has been growing discussion about the need to ensure that AI broadly benefits humanity. This in turn has spurred debate on the social responsibilities of large technology companies to serve the interests of society at large. In response, ethical principles and codes of conduct have been proposed to meet the escalating demand for this responsibility to be taken seriously. As yet, however, few institutional innovations have been suggested to translate this responsibility into legal commitments which apply to companies positioned to reap large financial gains from the development and use of AI. This paper offers one potentially attractive tool for addressing such issues: the Windfall Clause, which is an ex ante commitment by AI firms to donate a significant amount of any eventual extremely large profits. By this we mean an early commitment that profits that a firm could not earn without achieving fundamental, economically transformative breakthroughs in AI capabilities will be donated to benefit humanity broadly, with particular attention towards mitigating any downsides from deployment of windfall-generating AI.