As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout

Silicon Valley has opined on the promise of generative AI to forge new career paths and economic opportunities – like the newly coveted solo unicorn startup. Banks and analysts have touted AI’s potential to boost GDP. But those gains are unlikely to be distributed equally in the face of what many expect to be widespread AI-related job loss.

Amid this backdrop, Anthropic on Friday launched its Economic Futures Program, a new initiative to support research on AI’s impacts on the labor market and global economy and to develop policy proposals to prepare for the shift.

“Everybody’s asking questions about what are the economic impacts [of AI], both positive and negative,” Sarah Heck, head of policy programs and partnerships at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “It’s really important to root these conversations in evidence and not have predetermined outcomes or views on what’s going to [happen].”

At least one prominent name has shared his views on the potential economic impact of AI: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei. In May, Amodei predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as high as 20% in the next one to five years.

When asked if one of the key goals of Anthropic’s Economic Futures Program was to research ways to mitigate AI-related job loss, Heck was cautious, noting that the disruptive shifts AI will bring could be “both good and bad.”

“I think the key goal is to figure out what is actually happening,” she said. “If there is job loss, then we should convene a collective group of thinkers to talk about mitigation. If there will be huge GDP expansion, great. We should also convene policy makers to figure out what to do with that. I don’t think any of this will be a monolith.”

The program builds on Anthropic’s existing Economic Index, launched in February, which open-sources aggregated, anonymized data to analyze the effects of AI on labor markets and the economy over time – data that many of its competitors lock behind corporate walls.

The program will focus on three main areas: providing grants to researchers investigating AI’s effect on labor, productivity, and value creation; creating forums to develop and evaluate policy proposals to prepare for AI’s economic impacts; and building datasets to track AI’s economic usage and impact.

Anthropic is kicking off the program with some action items.

The company has opened applications for its rapid grants of up to $50,000 for “empirical research on AI’s economic impacts,” as well as evidence-based policy proposals for Anthropic-hosted symposia events in Washington, D.C. and Europe in the fall. Anthropic is also seeking partnerships with independent research institutions and will provide partners with Claude API credits and other resources to support research.

For the grants, Heck noted that Anthropic is looking for individuals, academics, or teams that can come up with high-quality data in a short period of time.

“We want to be able to complete it within six months,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be peer-reviewed.”

For the symposia, Anthropic wants policy ideas from a wide variety of backgrounds and intellectual perspectives, said Heck. She noted that policy proposals would go “beyond labor.”

“We want to understand more about the transitions,” she said. “How do workflows happen in new ways? How are new jobs being created that nobody ever contemplated before?…How are certain skills remaining valuable while others are not?”

Heck said Anthropic also hopes to study the effects of AI on fiscal policy. For example, what happens if there’s a major shift in the way enterprises see value creation?

“We really want to open the aperture here on things that can be studied,” Heck said. “Labor is certainly one of them, but it’s a much broader swath.”

Anthropic rival OpenAI released its own Economic Blueprint in January, which focuses more on helping the public adopt AI tools, building robust AI infrastructure and establishing “AI economic zones” that streamline regulations to promote investment. While OpenAI’s Stargate project to build data centers across the U.S. in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank would create thousands of construction jobs, OpenAI doesn’t directly address AI-related job loss in its economic blueprint.

OpenAI’s blueprint does, however, outline frameworks where government could play a role in supply chain training pipelines, investing in AI literacy, supporting regional training programs, and scaling public university access to compute to foster local AI-literate workforces.

Anthropic’s economic impact program is part of a slow but growing shift among some tech companies to position themselves as part of the solution to the disruption they’re helping to create – whether out of reputational concern, genuine altruism, or a mix of both. For instance, on Thursday, ride-hail company Lyft launched a forum to gather input from human drivers as it starts integrating robotaxis into its platform.