Introducing the Anthropic Economic Futures Program

Today, we're announcing the Anthropic Economic Futures Program , a new initiative to support research and policy development focused on addressing AI’s economic impacts. We’re launching this initiative to understand how AI is reshaping the way we work and surface proposals on how to prepare for this shift. This program will serve as an extension of Anthropic’s Economic Index and its insights on AI usage across the workforce. Our goal for this program is to contribute to the development of new research and potential responses to the impacts of AI on the labor market and global economy. To accomplish this, the Economic Futures Program will focus on three pillars:

These pillars support and build on each other: better data enables better research, which helps inform better policy.

To start, the Economic Futures Program will fund research and bring together independent researchers and experts to study AI’s economic impacts and propose policy responses. We’ll do this through the following:

The economic questions raised by AI are both urgent and complex. Policymakers and industry leaders need a rigorous view of what’s actually happening as AI adoption continues to expand across global labor markets and workplaces. There's no shortage of opinions about AI's economic outcomes. We believe it's fundamental to ground these conversations in real-world data and invest in ongoing empirical analysis to track AI usage trends over time. That’s why we launched the Economic Index –publishing research and public datasets on AI usage across the economy–as a first step.

But we recognize that publishing data alone is not enough. We must also discuss potential solutions for managing AI’s impact on the economy and work. The proposals and frameworks we’ll need for the AI-enabled economy will require policymakers to consider fundamental questions about work, meaning, and what we want from the economy. There are already early signs of AI’s impact on the workforce. This is why we need research that keeps pace with AI’s development, to understand in real-time where this technology is creating economic opportunity—new jobs, increased productivity, novel forms of value creation—as well as where it might be causing dramatic shifts in labor dynamics. We believe this kind of effort can equip policymakers and broader society to successfully navigate the future.

Society’s response to AI is not predetermined. The decisions we make today about how to develop, deploy, and govern AI will have long-term ramifications.

The Anthropic Economic Futures Program represents our commitment to supporting the research and policy communities in meeting these challenges and opportunities. We're excited to build on what we learn together and help prepare for an AI-enabled economy.