Four companies that spend most of their waking hours trying to beat each other just put money into the same pot.
Microsoft, the OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, and Amazon are the anchor backers of RAISE US, a new nonprofit launched in late June with one stated job: help American workers adapt to AI-driven disruption. The rivals have been joined by more than two dozen other companies and philanthropies, and together they have already committed over $500 million. The goal is to reach $1 billion in multiyear funding.
It is a strange and telling moment. The same labs racing to build the technology that is unsettling the job market are now helping fund support systems for the people it disrupts.
Most workforce announcements promise more training courses and leave it there. This one is trying to be more specific.
RAISE US says it will design and test corporate incentives that reward retraining and redeploying workers rather than cutting them. It also wants to build support systems for people moving between jobs, and to create training tied to what employers are actually hiring for. Instead of measuring success by how many people enroll in a program, it says it will judge providers on whether participants find work, earn more, and move up.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Reskilling efforts have a long history of producing certificates that lead nowhere, and the people running this one appear aware of that risk.
The organization is led by Gina Raimondo, the former U.S. Commerce Secretary and Rhode Island governor, who serves as CEO and co-chair. Her co-chair is Eric Holcomb, the former governor of Indiana. The pairing is deliberate. One is a Democrat, the other a Republican, and the advisory ranks reportedly stretch from former House Speaker Paul Ryan to AFL-CIO labor leader Liz Shuler.
Holcomb framed the effort as an all-hands-on-deck moment rather than a partisan project.
Raimondo has described the challenge in blunt terms: America may have a technology strategy for leading the AI race, but it still needs a people strategy to match it. She has also warned that building the world’s strongest AI systems will mean little if millions of workers are left behind.
Rather than wait on Congress, RAISE US is starting with governors. The first partners are Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah, a mix chosen partly for political balance and partly because those states are already moving on the issue.
The logic is practical. States run the community colleges and credentialing systems, along with the business incentives that decide whether a company retrains its people or shows them the door. In Arkansas, the group is backing an AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas LAUNCH. In Maryland, it is expanding a service-year program that points young people toward fields with worker shortages such as healthcare, and standing up an accelerator for displaced workers who want to start their own businesses.
The roster behind the four anchors reads like a cross-section of the economy: Bank of America, IBM, General Motors, Mastercard, Cisco, AMD, Deloitte, Eli Lilly, and Workday among them, alongside philanthropies including the Rockefeller Foundation and Pivotal, the group founded by Melinda French Gates. The point of that spread is hard to miss. AI disruption won't arrive only through chatbots. It shows up when banks automate back-office work or factories redesign maintenance. It shows up again when hospitals lean on AI for paperwork.
To keep the effort honest, RAISE US says its policy lab will be funded by philanthropies rather than its corporate sponsors, so its recommendations aren't paid for by the same firms they might hold accountable.
There is an uncomfortable subplot here, and the people involved are not pretending otherwise. Several large companies backing AI adoption have also announced layoffs or restructuring, sometimes while pointing to automation and AI as part of the shift. Critics may see the launch as a polished exercise in looking busy while the disruption rolls on.
The backers are leaning into the contradiction rather than hiding it. Amazon points to its Career Choice program, which it says has helped more than 300,000 employees earn degrees and certificates, and a $2.5 billion training commitment. Microsoft has been cross-training some entry-level lawyers and giving them AI skills so they can move into new roles instead of being let go. Microsoft President Brad Smith has described the approach as a way to move people from jobs being eliminated into jobs being created.
Anthropic’s Jack Clark has also acknowledged how difficult the economic impact is to forecast, framing RAISE US as part of the infrastructure needed to navigate AI’s effects on work.
The pressure behind all of this is already visible. Demand for AI skills in job postings has surged over the past year, according to recent labor-market analyses. The harder question is no longer whether AI will reshape work. It is whether a program like this can prove it actually moved people into jobs that last, before the next wave of change arrives.
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