Scenarios for our Economic Future \ Anthropic

We don’t know yet how AI will reshape the economy. Will it lead to unprecedented growth? Widespread unemployment? Neither, or something else? How can we tell?
Anthropic’s Economics team built a model of how AI might affect jobs, growth, and unemployment in the US in coming years. Read about possible economic futures and make your own predictions about AI capabilities to see the economy they imply.
We study how AI is reshaping the economy because we’re committed to ensuring that this transition is beneficial for society, including workers. By providing better visibility into our possible economic future, we can take steps to make sure that everyone benefits from it.
While our Economic Index measures how AI is being used across the economy right now, this scenario explorer is about looking ahead. Based on our technical report, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI (Korinek et al., 2026), this explorer gives you a chance to find out what the economy might look like as AI continues to get more capable.
In scenarios ranging from business as usual to an economy where AI increases growth to about twice the normal rate, unemployment stays within the historical range and wages remain flat or rise depending on the industry. But in scenarios where growth is faster than anything in economic history, there are adverse impacts on wages and job prospects for knowledge workers. In those scenarios, society is far wealthier, so the challenge is making sure that the gains are broadly shared.
As you scroll down, you’ll see an overview of how AI affects the economy. Then, you can plug in your expectations for how capable AI will be, and how extensively it will be used across the economy in the future. The model will show you what the economy in 2030 might look like if your predictions come true—and how your predictions compare to others.
This model represents all the jobs people do in the economy as bundles of tasks. AI can help people do a given task better or faster. It can automate the task. It might not affect the task at all. And it can lead to new tasks.
Think of a day in the life of a nurse
You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood. She triages incoming patients, charts patients’ vitals, and orders supplies for the ward. That’s just the start of the list.
Each of the tasks listed are based on the US Department of Labor’s O*NET taxonomy, listing the tasks for each occupation.
Jobs change over time
Tasks leave the bundle (hardly anyone hand-writes paper charts anymore) and new tasks arrive (30 years ago, no one monitored patients remotely). The bundle of tasks isn’t static, and the job changes as tasks change.
Only humans can do some tasks
For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.
Some tasks will get augmented
AI helps a human do them better, or faster. AI helps the nurse draft discharge instructions, monitor patients remotely, and plan the shift’s care schedule.
Some tasks may get fully automated
For instance, AI may chart a patient’s vitals, or order the ward’s supplies.
And new tasks will appear
Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.
The result: the nurse’s job changes
As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
Every task happens millions of times every day, across the country
Nurses are doing their work on every ward and on every shift. As more nurses use AI, AI supports a higher percentage of these millions of instances of each task.
From tasks to the economy
Today, if you add up every single instance of tasks performed in the US, by people and by the machines and software they work with, you get the US economy: over $30 trillion of value created over the past year. So how will AI shape the economy of the future?
The answer depends on how AI affects all the tasks that make up the economy, the new tasks it creates, and how fast AI takes on this work. Will AI lead to more task augmentation or automation? How much more productive will it make us? How quickly will it be adopted by workers and companies? The answers to these questions have direct effects on GDP, the labor market, and the share of the pie taken home by workers.
The future will depend on how AI’s capabilities advance, and how industries and workers adopt those capabilities. The three scenarios we share capture distinct kinds of impact.
In the modest scenario, it’s hard to see the effect of AI in macroeconomic data: its economic impact is something like the internet’s. In the substantial scenario, AI makes a bigger impact than the internet, or the railroad. And in the extreme scenario, AI drives a completely transformed, unprecedented economy, likely driven by recursively self-improving AI systems and a faster rate of AI adoption.
Small economic gains
In the modest scenario, AI has roughly the same kind of impact as the internet did. It drives real economic gains, but they’re within the historical norm for new technologies, and they arrive gradually.
A revolution in knowledge work
In the substantial scenario, AI is capable of doing half of all knowledge work by 2030, the majority of it autonomously, but it’s not adopted for all of that work: most knowledge work tasks are still done without AI. The economy grows at twice its normal rate. Wages for knowledge workers don’t rise, but other workers see gains.
A profound economic transformation
In the extreme scenario, AI is more productive than humans at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks. It does nearly all of them autonomously, and it creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people. This scenario would likely require recursively self-improving AI, adopted quickly for knowledge work.
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