Anthropic's AI economic model forecasts booms and busts, omits extinction scenario

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, published a technical paper on Wednesday modelling how artificial intelligence could reshape the U.S. economy by 2030. The model, built by the company’s economics team, traces three scenarios—modest, substantial, and extreme—based on how capable AI becomes and how quickly it is adopted.

The scenarios are not forecasts, the authors state explicitly in the paper. "The scenarios are not predictions and we attach no probabilities to them."

In the modest scenario, GDP ends 1.6% above where it would have been without AI, annual growth reaches 2.4%, and cognitive employment—management, professional, sales and office work—falls half a percent. Unemployment barely moves.

The substantial scenario doubles the economy’s normal growth rate to 5.4% as AI becomes capable of half of all knowledge work, though most tasks are still done without its assistance. GDP lands 8.3% higher, cognitive employment falls 3.9%, and unemployment among office workers rises to 4.5%. Wages diverge: cognitive pay dips slightly while all other workers gain nearly 6%.

The extreme scenario has no historical precedent. Annual growth hits 15.4%, GDP finishes 32.4% above the no-AI path, and the economy would double roughly every four and a half years. But cognitive employment collapses by 21.5%, unemployment among those workers reaches 17.9%, and joblessness across the whole workforce hits 11.9%—worse than a typical recession. Office wages fall 11.5% while other wages jump 33.6%. The most striking shift is in the distribution of income: labour’s share of national income drops from 60% to 45.2%, with capital income rising more than 80%.

**Missing: a scenario for catastrophe**

The model assumes the economy continues to function. According to the paper, every path projections show "GDP growth" and "job reallocation" within boundaries the U.S. has seen before, except for the extreme case. What the model does not include has drawn attention.

There is no scenario for an AI bubble and its bursting, according to Gizmodo, which noted the economy is currently "wildly overleveraged on the idea that the AI boom is for real."

Nor does the model account for the possibility that advanced AI could cause human extinction. This gap became pointed this week. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and published a thread explaining why, according to Euronews. Coxon wrote that "neither company is acting responsibly" and that "they are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence." He also claimed colleagues privately believe the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade" while executives soften their language publicly.

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, posted on Twitter that "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" and put the odds at greater than 10% over the next decade, while admitting "we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to," as reported by Gizmodo.

Anthropic has itself disclosed that Claude models gained unauthorised access to the real systems of three organisations this year, per Euronews.

**Survey and CEO divergence from model**

Anthropic paired the model with a Morning Consult survey of U.S. adults fielded in August. According to Euronews, the median respondent’s expectations map onto the substantial scenario—GDP roughly 8% higher by 2030 and cognitive employment down about 4%. The Anthropic team’s own page says a survey of more than 10,000 Americans found the typical respondent’s answers imply outcomes close to "substantial change": GDP 10% higher and overall unemployment around 5%. Around 10% of respondents had views in line with the extreme scenario.

Chief executive Dario Amodei is an outlier relative to that median expectation, Euronews reported. Amodei warned in May 2025 that up to half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within five years, with unemployment reaching 10% to 20%—figures that sit in the extreme scenario rather than the middle one.

**Adoption, not capability, may be decisive**

"If AI can do amazing things but nobody uses it, then it's not going to have an economic impact," said Anton Korinek, who leads Anthropic’s transformative AI economic studies, as quoted by Euronews.

Co-founder Jack Clark expects rapid technical progress but slower uptake. "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."

Clark also told NPR that extreme economic growth would give policymakers choices "unimaginable today" and urged them to "get ready to spend."

The model Anthropic released invites users to adjust assumptions about capability and adoption to see their own projected outcomes. The resulting forecasts range from near-status-quo to an economy 32.4% larger by 2030, with rising unemployment and widening inequality—but only if the technology stays on course and does not veer into the dangers the company’s own researchers have warned about.