Anthropic’s latest research suggests that while AI is rapidly changing the way work gets done, it hasn’t meaningfully eliminated jobs. At least, not yet. But beneath what Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, says is a “still healthy” labor market, early signs are pointing to uneven impacts, especially for younger workers just entering the workforce.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Axios AI Summit in Washington, McCrory said the company’s newest economic impact report finds little evidence of widespread job displacement so far.
“There’s no material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for the “most central task of their job in automated ways” — like technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers — and workers in jobs less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.”
But with AI adoption spreading across industries, that could shift — fast. If Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is to be believed, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within the next five years.
“Displacement effects could materialize very quickly, so you want to establish a monitoring framework to understand that before it materializes so that we can catch it as it’s happening and ideally identify the appropriate policy response,” McCrory told TechCrunch.
Staying ahead of those trends is why tracking AI growth, adoption, and diffusion is so important, he said.
In theory, McCrory said, AI models like Claude can do almost anything a computer can do. In practice, most users are only scratching the surface of those capabilities.
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He said Anthropic looked at which roles involve tasks AI is particularly good at, are already being automated, and are tied to real workplace use cases — the areas most likely to signal where displacement could emerge.
Anthropic’s fifth economic impact report, released Tuesday, also found that even where there hasn’t been much displacement yet, there’s a growing skills gap between earlier …