Yesterday in AI: 06 April 2026 — OpenAI Wants Robot Taxes, Claude Goes Dark

OpenAI published a 13-page economic blueprint calling for robot taxes and government-subsidized four-day workweeks; Claude.ai went dark for 8,000 users; and an event management startup became the first in its sector to ship a native MCP server.

By OMC Editorial on 2026-04-07

OpenAI dropped a 13-page economic policy document on April 6 proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and government-subsidized four-day workweeks — all on the same day Claude.ai went offline for 8,000 users. OpenAI's 13-Page Blueprint for the "Intelligence Age" On April 6, OpenAI published "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First," a 13-page policy blueprint calling for sweeping economic reforms to manage AI-driven disruption. The centrepiece is a nationally managed public wealth fund, seeded by contributions from AI companies, that would invest in AI firms and distribute returns as direct dividends to American citizens — explicitly modelled on Alaska's Permanent Fund. The document also proposes shifting the tax burden from labour to capital through a robot tax, echoing a 2017 Bill Gates idea. Perhaps most provocatively, it calls for government pilots of 32-hour workweeks with no pay loss, framing reduced hours as a mechanism to share productivity gains from automation. OpenAI positions all three proposals as ways to ensure "economic power and opportunity don't become too concentrated." Critics noted the irony of the world's most valuable AI company writing the rulebook for AI wealth redistribution. Sources: TechCrunchhttps://techcrunch.com/2026/04/06/openais-vision-for-the-ai-economy-public-wealth-funds-robot-taxes-and-a-four-day-work-week/ · The Next Webhttps://thenextweb.com/news/openai-robot-taxes-wealth-fund-superintelligence-policy · Newsweekhttps://www.newsweek.com/sam-altman-proposes-robot-tax-as-american-economy-transforms-11788200 Claude.ai Goes Down for 8,000 Users Anthropic's Claude.ai suffered an outage on April 6 from approximately 15:00 to 16:30 UTC — roughly 90 minutes — with Downdetector logging more than 8,000 user reports at peak. Login failures and mid-session chat errors hit both the web interface and Claude Code's hosted features; voice mode was also disrupted. The Claude API and Claude for Government