Anthropic has put numbers on what its own technology might do to the American economy and the range is enormous.
On Sept. 9, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, published a model of the U.S. economy in 2030 laying out three futures. In the mildest, AI is about as big a deal as the internet was.
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In the wildest scenario, AI gets better than humans at most knowledge work and takes it over outright, leaving the country with an economy that doubles in size every 4.5 years, but with nearly 1 in 5 knowledge workers unemployed.
In all three scenarios, including the calm one, a bigger slice of the money ends up with people who own things instead of people who work.
What AI takes
Rather than ask whether AI takes your job, Anthropic’s economic model asks which parts of your job it takes. The AI company uses the example of a nurse. Picture a nurse’s shift. They do their rounds, draw blood, chart vitals, order supplies for the ward and support patients and their families.
AI can’t bathe a patient — but it might draft the discharge instructions or handle the supply order outright. And tech will also help sprout new jobs along the way, because somebody now has to check whether AI triaged that patient correctly.
That’s just one shift. Multiply it by every nurse on every ward, then by every job in the country and you have the economy. So the model asks two things: how many job tasks AI can take and where the displaced people end up.
The three futures
In the first scenario,AI is involved in about 4% of the country’s work and that’s mostly AI helping a person rather than replacing them. Anthropic research estimates economic growth nudges from 2% a year to 2.4% and unemployment goes from 3.8% to 3.9%. Anthropic’s own comparison says that it’s roughly the same kind of impact the internet had.
In the second,AI touches 12% of the work and it’s mostly replacing people rather than assisting them.Growth reaches 5.4% a year and the unemployment rate rises from 3.8% to 4.6%.
The third and most extreme scenario is different. AI impacts 30% of the tasks in the economy — about half of all knowledge work — and does nearly all of it by itself. It also creates no new work to replace what it took, which Anthropic says would likely require AI systems that improve themselves. Growth hits 15.4% a year, fast enough to double the economy every 4.5 years. But unemployment could reach 11.9% overall and 17.9% among knowledge workers. The authors say that the “consequences go well beyond any event in history.”
Anthropic doesn’t say which of the three is most likely. It also leaves a lot out — no robots, no recessions, no market crashes and no government stepping in.
Where the money goes
Average wages rise in all three, but averages hide things.
The losers are the ones that will have their jobs threatened by AI, specifically knowledge workers, like management, professional, sales and office staff. In the middle scenario, their pay lands just below where it would have been without AI, while everyone else comes out 5.9% ahead. In the extreme one, knowledge-work pay drops more than 11% below the no-AI path while everyone else climbs by a third.
The bigger difference is between working and owning. Of every dollar the economy makes now, about 60 cents goes to people who work and 40 cents to people who own things. In the extreme scenario, the workers’ share falls to 45 cents and the owners’ share goes up to 54 cents. So the economy gets 32% bigger, while workers still take home what they would have without AI at all.
All of this assumes people actually use the thing. One of Anthropic’s own founders isn’t even sure they will, at least not quickly. Co-founder Jack Clark told NPR the technology will keep getting better fast, but “it will make its way into the economy more slowly.”
What this could mean for you
What nobody, including Anthropic, knows yet is how hard it’ll be to move into different work if yours dries up. These three scenarios show what happens, but they don’t tell you much else. What they do tell you is where to put your attention.
Rather than focus on whether AI can do your job, think more about whether you could do another one if it comes to that.
So, while you’re still employed: if your work thinned out over the next four years, where would you go?
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Anthropic says AI could double the U.S. economy every 4.5 years — but push knowledge-worker unemployment to 18%
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