Anthropic Economic Index: New building blocks for understanding AI use

Is artificial intelligence really making people faster at work? What sort of tasks does AI support best? And how might it change the nature of people’s occupations?

At Anthropic, we’re measuring real-world AI use on an ongoing basis to answer questions exactly like these. Our privacy-preserving analysis method allows us to learn more about conversations on Claude.ai (capturing uses by consumers) and our first-party API (mostly capturing uses by businesses). 1 In past reports, we’ve assessed AI tasks by occupation and wage level , looked more closely at software development , and studied AI use by country and by US state .

We’re now adding a new level of detail to our Economic Index. In our fourth report, we’re introducing what we’ve called economic primitives : a set of five simple, foundational measurements to track the economic impacts of Claude over time. Our initial set includes task complexity, skill level, purpose (work, education, or personal use), AI autonomy, and success. 2 We derive these primitives from asking Claude to answer a common set of questions about every conversation in our sample for this report.

These primitives provide a leading indicator of AI’s potential economic impacts—and allow us to answer far more complex questions about how AI is already changing jobs. Our latest report, which samples conversations from November 2025 (predominantly using Claude Sonnet 4.5), uses our primitives to explore a wide range of questions that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to answer—including how Claude’s task-level success rates change for more complex tasks, and whether the use of Claude to date might portend a net-deskilling effect on many jobs.

You can read the fourth Economic Index report here . Below, we summarize its results.

We applied our economic primitives to questions about individual tasks, occupations, and then the possible aggregate impacts of the changes we observe. (Our full methodology—including details on how we tested the accuracy of our primitives—is described in chapter two of the full report .)