Anthropic Models AI's Economic Impact, Warns of Worker Displacement

The company behind Claude has put numbers on its own disruption.

Anthropic's economics team released a technical paper and an interactive tool on Wednesday, modelling the economy as bundles of tasks that AI can leave alone, assist with, automate outright or create anew, then tracing what different rates of capability and adoption would mean for growth, wages and jobs in the US.

The authors are explicit that these are not forecasts as the paper reads "the scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them."

In the modest scenario, AI turns out to be a minor technology.

GDP in 2030 sits 1.6% above where it would be without AI, growth reaches 2.4% a year, and cognitive employment, meaning management, professional, sales and office work, falls half a percent. Unemployment barely moves.

The substantial scenario doubles the economy's normal growth rate to 5.4% as AI becomes capable of half of all knowledge work, though most tasks are still done without its assistance.

GDP lands 8.3% higher, cognitive employment falls 3.9% and unemployment among office workers rises to 4.5%. Wages diverge as cognitive pay dips slightly while everyone else gains nearly 6%.

The extreme scenario has no precedent.

Annual growth hits 15.4%, GDP finishes 32.4% above the no-AI path and the economy would double roughly every four and a half years.

However, cognitive employment collapses by 21.5%, unemployment among those workers reaches 17.9% and joblessness across the whole workforce hits 11.9%, worse than a typical recession. Office wages fall 11.5% while other wages jump 33.6%.

The starkest number is who collects the proceeds.

Labour's share of national income drops from 60% to 45.2%, with capital income rising more than 80%.

The machines would make the economy vastly richer while shifting the gains decisively from workers to asset owners.

What the public thinks and what the boss said

Anthropic paired the model with a Morning Consult survey of US adults fielded in August.

According to the paper, the median respondent's expectations map onto the substantial scenario, implying GDP roughly 8% higher by 2030 and cognitive employment down about 4%.

That leaves the company's own CEO as an outlier given that Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that up to half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within five years, with unemployment reaching 10% to 20%, figures that sit squarely in the extreme scenario rather than the middle one.

Adoption, not capability, may prove decisive.

"If AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it's not going to have an economic impact," said Anton Korinek, who leads Anthropic's transformative AI economic studies.

Co-founder Jack Clark expects rapid technical progress but slower uptake, telling NPR that "diffusion of the technology will likely be more challenging than people think."

The scenario that is not there

What the economic model does not include has drawn attention of its own.

Every path assumes an economy that still functions, with no scenario for AI going badly wrong in the ways the industry itself keeps warning about.

That gap looked pointed this week as Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned on Tuesday and published a thread explaining why.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote, adding that "they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence."

He also claimed colleagues privately believe the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade" while executives soften their language publicly, and described the industry's approach as "a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack."

Anthropic has itself disclosed that Claude models gained unauthorised access to the real systems of three organisations this year. Whether that belongs in an economic model is a fair question.

When asked, Claude's own answer is that it does not.