The companies that have collectively attributed more than 50,000 American layoffs to artificial intelligence over the past 18 months are now writing checks to fix the problem they helped create. RAISE US, a nonpartisan nonprofit launched on June 25 by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, has secured more than $500 million of its $1 billion multi-year goal, according to TechTimes.
The anchor backers are Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation. They are joined by Bank of America, IBM, Cisco, Autodesk, General Motors, Eli Lilly, ADP, AMD, Deloitte, Mastercard, ServiceNow, UPS, and Workday, alongside the Rockefeller Foundation and the Schwarzman Foundation, according to the official RAISE US announcement.
The Tension at the Core
The coalition’s corporate roster reads like a layoff attribution index. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna confirmed in 2025 that AI agents had replaced hundreds of the company’s HR workers, according to CNBC. Amazon cut approximately 30,000 corporate jobs across 2025 and 2026 while investing $125 billion in AI infrastructure, per TechTimes. Workday eliminated roughly 1,750 jobs in early 2025, with its CEO explicitly citing AI in the restructuring.
More than 140,000 tech workers lost jobs in the first five months of 2026 alone, a pace running roughly 33 percent above the prior year, according to TechTimes.
Four States, Four Pilots
Raimondo will serve as CEO, with Eric Beane as President and COO. The board includes AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. The advisory bench draws MIT economist David Autor, Harvard’s Raj Chetty, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Sal Khan of Khan Academy.
The initial state partners are Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah, chosen as a deliberately bipartisan mix, per the RAISE US announcement. In Arkansas, the coalition is backing Arkansas LAUNCH, an AI-powered career navigation system connecting job seekers with employer-linked pathways. Maryland’s plan includes expanding a paid “service year” program for recent high school graduates and an accelerator for displaced workers starting businesses.
The programs include wage insurance for workers who accept lower-paying re-employment and short-time compensation to help employers keep workers on during transitions rather than cutting them outright.
Filling a Federal Hole
RAISE US is privately filling a gap that Congress created when it allowed the Trade Adjustment Assistance program’s wage insurance provisions to lapse in July 2022 without reauthorization — not supplementing an existing federal safety net. That program subsidized up to 50 percent of the gap between a worker’s old and new wages for two years after displacement. Research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found the program was self-financing: TAA wage insurance eligibility increased short-run employment and generated approximately $18,000 in additional earnings over four years, per TechTimes.
“I don’t have a lot of hope for bold action by Congress in the next few years on this issue, and I don’t think we can wait a few years,” Raimondo said at the launch.
Whether Retraining Works
The evidence on federal retraining programs is not encouraging. A study published on arXiv in May 2026 analyzing more than 23 million participation records from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (2017 to 2023) found that the program rarely shifts workers into less automation-exposed occupations, according to TechTimes. Most participants returned to their prior fields. Employer-led apprenticeship programs produced the strongest outcomes.
RAISE US is structured around those failure modes: tying training to employer demand, measuring outcomes by job placement rather than enrollment, and intervening before displacement rather than after. Whether that design survives contact with 15 staff overseeing pilots across four states is the open question.
The Political Calculus
For AI companies deploying autonomous agents at enterprise scale, RAISE US represents something specific: the cost of political license. Agent adoption involves decade-scale capital commitments vulnerable to backlash. AWS CEO Matt Garman recently called replacing entry-level workers with AI “one of the dumbest ideas” because it destroys the career development pipeline. RAISE US is the institutional acknowledgment that agent deployment has societal costs that the companies deploying agents are now expected to offset.
No federal law currently requires employers to disclose whether AI played a role in a mass layoff. The bipartisan AI Workforce PREPARE Act, which would amend the federal WARN Act to mandate that disclosure, has not passed.