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Artificial intelligence could push annual US economic growth above 15 per cent by 2030 while leaving nearly one in five knowledge workers unemployed, according to a new economic model from Anthropic that attempts to put numbers around the upheaval AI may bring to the labour market.<\/p>\n
The company behind Claude has modelled three possible paths for the US economy over the next four years, ranging from AI having an impact comparable with earlier technological shifts to an extreme scenario in which rapidly advancing systems transform much of knowledge work.<\/p>\n
The findings present a striking contradiction. In Anthropic\u2019s most extreme scenario, the United States becomes substantially richer, but many of the workers most exposed to AI are worse off.<\/p>\n
Annual GDP growth reaches 15.4 per cent and the economy is 32.4 per cent larger in 2030 than it would have been without AI, reaching about US$44.4 trillion in 2025 dollars. At that pace, the economy would roughly double every four and a half years.<\/p>\n
At the same time, employment among knowledge workers falls 21.5 per cent. Their unemployment rate rises to 17.9 per cent, while unemployment across the entire workforce reaches 11.9 per cent. Wages for knowledge workers are 11.5 per cent lower than under the model\u2019s no-AI path.<\/p>\n
Workers outside those occupations fare very differently. Their wages rise 33.6 per cent in the extreme scenario, illustrating how unevenly the economic effects of AI could be distributed.<\/p>\n
Perhaps more significant is what happens to the division of the nation\u2019s income.<\/p>\n
Labour\u2019s share falls from 60 per cent to 45.2 per cent, while capital\u2019s share rises to 54.8 per cent. Capital income is more than 80 per cent higher than it would have been without AI. In other words, the model produces an economy with far greater output, but a much larger proportion of that prosperity flows to owners of capital rather than workers.<\/p>\n
Anthropic is careful not to describe this as a prediction. The researchers state that \u201cthe scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them\u201d.<\/p>\n
Instead, the model asks what could happen under different assumptions about how capable AI becomes, how quickly companies adopt it, how autonomously it can perform tasks, how much it raises productivity and how easily displaced workers can move into other occupations.<\/p>\n
The less dramatic scenarios look very different.<\/p>\n