Skip to content
News Regulation

RAISE US launches with $500 million to retrain workers displaced by AI

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb launched RAISE US on June 25, 2026, a bipartisan nonprofit targeting $1 billion to fund AI workforce retraining across four US states.

RAISE US launches with $500 million to retrain workers displaced by AI

The four technology companies whose AI models are most aggressively displacing knowledge workers (Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI) are the anchor funders of RAISE US, a new $500 million nonprofit that launched June 25 to retrain the workers their products are disrupting. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb are leading the effort, which has a $1 billion total target.

What launched

RAISE US is structured as a national nonprofit. Raimondo serves as CEO, with Eric Beane as President and COO and Janet Foutty as President of Corporate Partnerships. More than 25 companies and philanthropies back the effort at launch, including ADP, Bank of America, Blackstone, Cisco, Eli Lilly, General Motors, IBM, Mastercard, the Rockefeller Foundation, UPS, and Workday.

Initial state partnerships are live in four states. Arkansas is deploying an AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas LAUNCH. Maryland is piloting service-year pathway expansion with an entrepreneurship accelerator for displaced workers. Two additional state pilots are underway in Connecticut and Utah. Per the organization's own release, the national focus spans apprenticeships (with a healthcare and advanced manufacturing emphasis), employer incentives to retrain existing workers, and a Policy Lab testing worker support models. The Policy Lab operates outside corporate funding.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler sits on the advisory board, a notable inclusion given organized labor's historically adversarial relationship with AI vendors.

Why it matters

Raimondo put the stakes plainly in the launch statement. Per RAISE US: "America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition. It does not yet have a people strategy," and she argued the country cannot lead without one.

She also flagged the floor risk in a separate comment per Fortune: "We're talking about a certain level of unemployment that could destabilize our country and our democracy."

The practical consequence for AI tool operators and vendors: RAISE US is the first large-scale, cross-party US effort to build a retraining infrastructure ahead of broad AI-driven labor displacement, and it has pulled in the four companies whose models are doing the most to accelerate that displacement as anchor funders. That alignment matters because it signals those vendors are staking some public accountability on the outcome, not just writing checks. The $1 billion target, if reached, is a meaningful capital pool for state-level pilots, though it is small relative to total US workforce training spend. Operators building AI products in sectors the initiative targets (healthcare, manufacturing, career services) will see government and employer demand shaped by which training models RAISE US validates.

The bipartisan co-leadership matters too. Raimondo was a Democrat in the Biden cabinet; Holcomb is a Republican. In a period when AI regulation cleaves along party lines, a nonprofit that can win governor-level partnerships in red and blue states simultaneously is structurally better positioned to scale nationally than an effort that lands in one political lane.

Context

Joint participation across competing AI vendors in a single workforce fund is less about competitive alignment and more about managing the policy risk of being seen as driving labor disruption without contributing to the fix. RAISE US is independent of the White House AI security directive signed in June 2026, though both reflect the same political moment.

What to watch next

The critical test is whether the four state programs produce published outcome data. Apprenticeship and retraining programs in healthcare and manufacturing typically take 12 to 24 months to show job-placement figures. The Policy Lab's outputs, which are likely to feed legislative proposals, will be the earlier signal. RAISE US has not published a timeline for those reports. The gap between the $500 million secured and the $1 billion target will also indicate whether the corporate coalition holds once the launch cycle ends.

Sources