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By how much, if at all, will AI boost the U.S. economy?
New research by Anthropic, seen exclusively by TIME in advance of its release today, offers at least a partial answer to that question.
By studying aggregated data about how people use Claude in the course of their work, Anthropic researchers came up with an estimate for how much AI could contribute to annual labor productivity growth—an important contributor to the total level of growth in the overall economy—as the technology becomes more widely used.
Their answer: current-generation AI models could increase the U.S. annual labor productivity growth rate by 1.8%—doubling the average rate of growth since 2019. Assuming that labor makes up 60% of total productivity in the economy, and that AI reaches full diffusion in a decade’s time, “this implies an overall total factor productivity increase of 1.1% per year,” the researchers write. That number, the authors of the study tell TIME, is a close approximation of how much AI could contribute to overall economic growth. “In these models, typically, labor productivity would be GDP growth,” assuming labor supply stays fixed, Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s head of economics and coauthor of the study, tells TIME.
How the study works — But take these numbers with a large pinch of salt, because the method that yielded them is unorthodox. First, Anthropic researchers built a tool (called Clio) that allows them to extract details about real-world Claude usage in what they say is a privacy-preserving way. Armed with a sample of 100,000 conversations, the researchers analyzed them to check what kinds of tasks Claude was performing in each. To quantify how much time Claude saved in each conversation, they asked a separate version of Claude to estimate how long each task would take with and without…
