The first basic income program for workers who have lost pay, jobs, or opportunities to AI began sending out its first funds this week. The program is run by the nonprofits the AI Commons Project and What We Will, who together are administering the AI Dividend, which will issue a no-strings payment of $1,000 a month for a year to a cohort of 25-50 impacted workers. The project’s organizers say they have $300,000 in initial funding, and hope to expand quickly. They plan to distribute $3 million in funds in 2026—and aim to do so by pushing the major AI companies to contribute to the effort.

“Over the last few years, I’ve been mentoring students who have really struggled to land any jobs,” Kaitlin Cort, a veteran software engineer and programming instructor, tells me.

Cort is one of the organizers behind the AI Dividend, and she says she was alerted to a growing problem as she’s tried to find jobs for graduates of her programming classes. (She’s taught for Per Scholas, Future Code, and NYC Tech Talent Pipeline programs.) Cort says she’s seen the job market for entry level programmers dry up as executives and managers across the tech industry embrace Copilot and Claude. “The few jobs that students have landed have often been demeaning,” Cort says, “and not really allowing them to do real engineering work, but rather asking them to revie