Extreme scenario projects 14% unemployment, GDP growth sevenfold

Anthropic has released an interactive tool that lets users test their own assumptions about how artificial intelligence could reshape the U.S. economy. The tool, released by the company behind the Claude AI assistant, models outcomes that depend on four variables: how capable and flexible the technology becomes, how quickly it is adopted, whether it supports or replaces workers, and whether displaced workers find new work.

At one end of the spectrum, AI delivers a modest productivity boost with little effect on employment. At the other extreme, gross domestic product grows more than sevenfold while nearly 14% of workers lose their jobs to the technology and less than half find new ones.

In a blog post accompanying the release, Anthropic experts described the two bookends as “modest change” and “extreme.” “In the modest change scenario, AI is a small technology,” they wrote. “The economy continues on a ‘normal’ path with AI making changes around the margins. In the extreme scenario, AI transforms the economy. The macroeconomic consequences go well beyond any event in history, both in terms of magnitudes and in terms of the speed at which change happens.”

The study’s authors declined to predict which outcome is more likely. In general, they said, AI experts tend to project a more rapid spread of the technology while economists tend to be more cautious.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said he falls somewhere in between. “I think the technology will keep developing at a very, very fast and sustained rate but diffusion of the technology will likely be more challenging than people think,” Clark told NPR. “So it will get really, really good. But it will make its way into the economy more slowly.”

A separate Anthropic survey of nearly 11,000 people found the public expects both a significant boost in productivity and economic growth and substantial disruption to workers in AI-sensitive fields. Adoption speed will be a major determinant of the technology’s economic impact, according to Anton Korinek, Anthropic’s head of transformative AI economic studies. “If the AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it’s not going to have an economic impact,” Korinek said.

In Anthropic’s extreme case, the surge in growth could produce additional tax revenue to support workers who are hurt by the technology. Clark said policymakers should prepare for that possibility. “If you end up with this level of GDP growth, you have moves available to you as a [government] policymaker that are unimaginable today,” Clark said. “Policymakers should get ready to spend.”