Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has published a detailed economic model that attempts to quantify how artificial intelligence might reshape the US economy by 2030. The paper, released on Wednesday, presents three scenarios ranging from a barely noticeable impact to an unprecedented boom, with stark implications for employment and income distribution.
The model, developed by Anthropic's economics team, treats the economy as a collection of tasks that AI can either leave untouched, assist with, automate completely, or create anew. By varying the pace of capability improvement and adoption, the researchers trace the effects on GDP, wages, and jobs. The authors are careful to note that these are not predictions: "The scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them."
Three paths for AI's economic impact
In the modest scenario, AI turns out to be a minor technology. GDP in 2030 would be just 1.6% higher than without AI, annual growth would reach 2.4%, and cognitive employment—covering management, professional, sales, and office work—would fall by only 0.5%. Unemployment would barely move.
The substantial scenario envisions AI becoming capable of half of all knowledge work, though most tasks are still performed without its help. This would double the economy's normal growth rate to 5.4% per year, with GDP 8.3% higher by 2030. Cognitive employment would drop by 3.9%, pushing unemployment among office workers to 4.5%. Wages would diverge: cognitive pay would dip slightly, while other workers would see gains of nearly 6%.
The extreme scenario has no historical precedent. Annual growth would hit 15.4%, GDP would finish 32.4% above the no-AI path, and the economy would double roughly every four and a half years. But the human cost would be severe: cognitive employment would collapse by 21.5%, unemployment among those workers would reach 17.9%, and overall joblessness would hit 11.9%—worse than a typical recession. Office wages would fall 11.5%, while other wages would jump 33.6%.
The starkest number is who collects the proceeds. Labour's share of national income would drop 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.
Public expectations vs. CEO warnings
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: 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.
For Europe, the findings carry weight beyond the US. The EU is already grappling with AI regulation and its potential impact on labour markets. The EU cybersecurity agency's recent access to Anthropic's systems underscores the continent's interest in the technology's governance. Meanwhile, Coxon's warnings resonate with European policymakers who have pushed for stricter oversight. As Italy's growth struggles and demographic shifts reshape the continent, the question of who benefits from AI is not just an American one.
