A New Anthropic Model Seeks to Test How AI Could Impact the US Economy
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude assistant, has created an interactive tool to show how AI might affect the U.S economy a little or a lot in the next few years.
Close-up of a phone screen in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024, displaying Claude, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot powered by large language model (or LLM). (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)
Will artificial intelligence light a fire under the U.S. economy in the coming years? That’s been a big question in the field of economics, and now Anthropic — the company behind the popular Claude AI assistant — is taking a stab at helping people find their own answers. The company has created an interactive tool that lets users test their assumptions about how productive — or disruptive — the AI boom might be.
In one scenario, artificial intelligence provides a gentle boost to the economy, lifting growth rates with little effect on workers. At the other extreme, GDP soars, but so does unemployment, with nearly 14% of workers losing their jobs to AI and less than half of them finding new ones.
The different outcomes depend on how capable and flexible the technology is, how quickly it’s adopted, whether it supports or replaces workers, and whether displaced workers find new work to do.
“If the AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it’s not going to have an economic impact,” says Anton Korinek, Anthropic’s head of transformative AI economic studies.
While rapid adoption of the technology could be more disruptive, it could also produce much faster economic growth. In Anthropic’s extreme case, GDP grows at more than seven times its current pace. That could produce a lot of additional tax revenue to support workers who are hurt by AI.
“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 says. “Policymakers should get ready to spend.”