AEI

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a conservative, free-market think tank founded in 1938 and headquartered in Washington, DC. It publishes research advocating limited government, private enterprise, and market-led economic policy, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential right-of-centre policy organisations in the United States.

AEI entered the AI employment debate directly, publishing a rebuttal to Bernie Sanders' HELP Committee staff report, which projected AI could displace approximately 100 million US workers over a decade. AEI contested those projections, arguing the report 'ignores the data on AI and inequality' and that current AI tools function as skill equalisers raising performance at the lower end of the labour market rather than eliminating positions outright. The Brookings Institution reached separate conclusions, with working-paper authors finding labour taxation vulnerability would force structural shifts toward consumption taxes.

AEI's intervention sits at the centre of a contested empirical question: whether AI functions as a job-creator, job-transformer, or job-destroyer. Its free-market framing puts it in direct opposition to Sanders' proposed robot tax , and the outcome of that debate will shape whether Congress legislates on automation or leaves markets to self-correct.