Universal Prompt Income
Governments Won’t Act, So We Will
A Manifesto for a New Income System in the Age of AI
A Call to Arms
“In the broadest terms, AI is expected to disrupt approximately 25% of all jobs across all industries and occupations over the next 3 years.”
— NSF Report on AI Impact on Workforce in the United States, 2025, p. 4
Governments either can’t, or won’t, help.
Proposed solutions like Universal Basic Income (UBI) remain stalled.
In the U.S., Trump’s AI czar David Sacks dismissed UBI as a fantasy.
In the UK, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak rejected it in favor of retraining and productivity incentives.
But rent is due in 2 days. Life doesn’t pause for politicians to argue or dismiss. We need to act now.
When the systems built to protect us fail, we have only one option: build new ones, by leveraging the best of AI not just to replace labor, but to build toward a future of post scarcity and shared abundance.
If the government won’t act, we will.
This is not a proposal. It is a call to arms.
We are building Universal Prompt Income (UPI), a system that empowers people to earn a living by contributing directly to the new AI economy. There’s no way we can come up with this alone. We need diverse perspectives to join. We need you.
Be ready to see things through different lenses. Take ideas, filter them through your own knowledge and goals, and create something new.
Join the conversation: https://discord.com/invite/fqNNnr8nyH
What Is UPI?
UPI is a prompt-to-earn income system built for the AI economy.
It pays people for meaningful, verifiable contributions using ledger based systems.
It is not a cryptocurrency or speculative token.
It offers highly liquid, stable, and usable income in dollars, stablecoins, CBDCs, local fiat, or other supported assets.
UPI does not rely on redistributing existing wealth. It creates new economic activity through AI collaboration and community coordination.
It also serves as a bridge to UBI, demonstrating how a participatory, regenerative income model can evolve into a stable, unconditional safety net for all.
Over time, UPI and UBI can coexist:
UPI offers earned income and governance participation
UBI ensures baseline security
Putting Faces to the Future
Statistics explain the scale of disruption, but stories reveal its human cost and potential. Below are examples of how UPI will change lives:
Amira | Nairobi – A former classroom teacher, she now reviews Swahili training data for an education Agent each morning, earning enough UPI to keep her kids in school.
Lucas | San Francisco – His rideshare gigs vanished when robo taxis took over; he spends an hour a day editing AI ethics proposals and gets paid the rent difference.
Mei | Shenzhen – Once on a phone assembly line, she now designs open source hardware via a manufacturing Agent and earns UPI that rivals her old salary.
Élodie | Paris – A recent arts graduate curates AI generated exhibits for a cultural Agent, funding her studio time without juggling three side jobs.
Ravi | Bengaluru – Between caring for his parents, he translates medical prompts into Kannada, turning spare minutes into a steady UPI income stream.
Unlike UBI’s redistributive approach, funded by taxes or public borrowing, UPI operates on a regenerative model. This means the treasury grows through ongoing participation, aligned incentives, protocol fees, and yield strategies, creating a self-sustaining, expanding income system. The table below compares their core differences:
The Foundation: IdeaFoundry
UPI begins on IdeaFoundry, a platform to create, fund, and contribute to AI projects called Agents, autonomous AI systems governed by those who use and build them.
The Intent Graph is the coordination engine for IdeaFoundry and UPI. It interprets, maps, and routes human intent to the most relevant opportunities, Agents, or tasks.
The Flow:
Prompt: It starts with “I want to…” or “How can I contribute?”
Match: The Intent Graph matches your intent to the right communal Agent or task; or IdeaFoundry helps you create a new communal Agent
Contribute: You participate, coding, testing, translating, designing, voting, organizing
Earn: You are paid from that Agent’s treasury and the broader UPI ecosystem
All contributions are logged onchain, verifiable, and highly liquid
Seeding UPI with the Subsidies Agent
The Subsidies Agent is the genesis of UPI. It will be the first Agent launched on IdeaFoundry.
All IdeaFoundry Agent launches are fair launches, no early access, no insider allocations
The Subsidies Agent is designed to fund founders who can’t afford their token at launch.
It lowers the barrier to entry and empowers early contributors to co-own and shape the Agent economy.
Intent of the Subsidies Agent:
Make Agent ownership universal
Set foundations for UPI narratives
Bring the cost of entrepreneurship to near 0
The Vision: A Dual Income Future
UPI is the first step in creating conditions for UBI.
As AI and UPI create surplus, we can introduce UBI funded by AI rent, not human labor.
Aran Nayebi's 2025 paper models how a modest levy on AI generated rents could sustainably fund UBI without taxation or employment growth.
Together, UPI + UBI form a resilient post scarcity system:
UBI = unconditional baseline security
UPI = earned participation and upward mobility
This is not about replacing jobs, it’s about evolving with AI.
Universal Access Layer
The system is designed to totally lower the barrier to entry, where anyone, anywhere, with any interface, can earn.
All activity routes through the Intent Graph, using privacy preserving verification (e.g., zero knowledge proofs), adapting to local literacy, bandwidth, and device access.
A Theoretical Timeline
Where We Are Now
✅ IdeaFoundry is live on testnet ✅ Subsidies Agent launching at mainnet 🔜 Expanding Agent ecosystem, growing UPI participation 🔜 Integrating Intent Graph at scale 🔜 Modeling AI based UPI implementation
How Can You Help?
To begin contributing to UPI, start by asking yourself these questions. They're meant to help you think differently, draw from your own life, and imagine how we can build a fairer system together:
What kind of work should be valued but isn’t, and how could UPI reward it?
What’s broken in today’s economic system, and how could a prompt-to-earn model change that?
If you could earn from contributing your skills or values, what would you choose to do first?
Who is usually excluded from new technologies, and how can we make sure UPI includes them from day one?
How can your lived experiences help reimagine what earning, equity, and purpose should look like in the age of AI?
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