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.
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