Understanding AI’s Impact on the Economy: Introducing The Anthropic Economic Index

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the modern workforce, influencing everything from automation to high-skilled collaboration. While the long-term impact remains uncertain, Anthropic is already tracking AI’s real-world effects through its Economic Index, using Claude AI to analyze how businesses and professionals integrate AI into their daily tasks.

What is Claude AI?

Developed by Anthropic and released in March 2023, Claude is a generative AI system encompassing a series of large language models (LLMs). The most recent version, Claude 3.5 Haiku, is focused on improving the speed of human-AI interactions. Claude follows a constitutional AI framework, designed to align with a set of guiding principles. It improves its responses through a combination of supervised learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and self-refinement based on its constitutional framework.

Introducing the Anthropic Economic Index

The first report released by the Anthropic Economic Index was published in February 2025. By focusing on the incorporation of AI into real-world tasks, Anthropic analyzed millions of conversations via Claude AI during its study. Anthropic’s initial report concludes with the following insights:

Approximately 36% of users use AI in at least 25% of their associated tasks, with approximately 4% using it across 75% of their associated tasks.

57% of current AI usage revolves around augmentation and collaboration, with only 43% of usage revolving around task or workflow automation.

AI usage is most common in mid-to-high wage roles, including those in data and computer science.

Instead of focusing on individual occupations, the study emphasized occupational tasks. Considering that many jobs share numerous tasks, skills, and traits, this approach makes sense.

Source: Anthropic

Examining the Fine Print

But there are some caveats to consider. For example, the study only analyzed conversations from Claude’s Free and Pro plans, meaning it does not account for enterprise users or those using Claude for confidential business operations. The datasets only included conversations from these plans, and there is no direct way to verify whether individuals were using Claude for work-related tasks.

Regardless, the team behind the Anthropic Index is excited to release their initial report. Not only have they made their datasets available to the public in an open source format, but they currently have an open call for research scientists and engineers to participate in future projects.

Tracking AI’s Influence on the Economy

Despite the current popularity – and capability – of AI, it’s still impossible to gauge its long-term effect on the job market. Initiatives like the Anthropic Economic Index will be instrumental in tracking the relationship between AI and the economy for years to come.

While the study provides valuable insights into AI’s role in task automation and augmentation, its scope is limited by the available dataset and self-reported nature of AI usage. Although there are still some flaws and limitations to the underlying technology, it will only improve with time.
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