20260930 A Review of "Economic Scenarios for Transformative, an Anthropic Working Paper

Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory

The Anthropic Institute Working Paper No. 2026-02

September 2026

This is an AI generated review of a paper by economists from Anthropic that presents a framework for assessing the economic consequences of AI between 2026 and 2030. In the model, AI automates a growing share of cognitive work, raising productivity and displacing workers whomust search for jobs in other occupations. The model maps future paths of AI capabilities into implied paths for GDP, the labor share, wages, labor reallocation, and unemployment.

They illustrate the framework by considering three scenarios: modest, substantial, and extreme. Under modest change, AI adds less than half a point to GDP growth by 2030 and raises unemployment by a tenth of a point. In the extreme change scenario, AI has transformative effects, with AI performing almost half of today’s cognitive work by 2030. GDP growth then rises to 15 percent per year, the labor share of income falls from 60 to 45 percent, and nearly one in five cognitive workers is unemployed. We also surveyed US adults about their expectations for AI.

Views vary widely, but the median respondent’s answers are consistent with our substantial change scenario in which, by 2030, GDP rises by 8 percent and cognitive employment declines by 4 percent. The model offers a structured way to compare possibilities for our economic future under different expectations about AI.