Anthropic's AI economic impact scenarios

Anthropic's Economics team released an interactive scenario explorer based on Korinek et al. (2026) that models three levels of AI impact on GDP, employment, and wages through 2030. The extreme scenario, which assumes AI autonomously performs nearly all knowledge-work tasks and creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people, projects US GDP in 2030 would be 32.4% higher than without AI, with annual growth reaching 15% and the economy doubling every 4.5 years. Knowledge-worker unemployment reaches 17.9% under that scenario, compared with 3.9% for other workers and 11.9% economy-wide. Capital's share of GDP rises from roughly 40% to 54.8% while total labor income barely changes; knowledge-worker pay falls 11.5% below the no-AI baseline while other workers earn 33.6% more, and average pay across all workers rises 9.7%. All three scenarios show labor's share of income declining, ranging from a 0.6% drop in the modest case to 14.8% in the extreme. The model applies only to cognitive and knowledge workers, who make up 62% of employment, and excludes robotics. Anthropic surveyed more than 10,000 Americans and is sharing the interactive model publicly.