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What 81,000 people told us about the economics of AI \ Anthropic Economic Research What 81,000 people told us about the economics of AI Apr 22, 2026 Read the PDF

Key findings: Our recent survey of 81,000 Claude users shows that people who work in roles that are more exposed to AI have more concerns about AI-driven job displacement. These concerns are also higher among early-career respondents. Those in the highest- and lowest-paid occupations report the largest productivity gains, most commonly from increases in scope (doing new tasks). Respondents experiencing the largest speedups from AI express higher concern about job displacement.

In order to inform the public about the economic changes we’re observing with AI, our Economic Index shares what work Claude is being asked to do, and in which jobs Claude is doing the largest share of tasks. To date, however, we’ve lacked information on how these usage patterns map onto people’s thoughts and impressions of AI. Our recent survey study with 81,000 Claude users provides a way to connect people’s economic concerns with what we’ve quantified in Claude traffic. The survey asked people about their visions and fears around advances in AI. Many of the thoughts that people shared touched on economic topics. We learned that many people fear job displacement—though they also feel more productive and empowered at work. In some cases, AI has enabled them to start businesses, or given them time for more important things; in others, AI feels stifling, or imposed on them by their employers. The survey’s results provide initial evidence that observed exposure (our measure of AI displacement risk) is correlated with economic concern around AI. People in highly exposed occupations—as defined by the tasks Claude is observed performing—were more nervous about economic displacement. This is consistent with people being broadly aware of AI’s diffusion and potential impacts. We expand on our findings below. Who worries about job displacement? “Well like anyone who has a white collar job these days I'm 100% concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned about losing my job eventually to A.I.”—Software engineer. 1 One fifth of the respondents in our survey voiced concern about economic displacement. Some worried about this in the abstract: one software developer cautioned about “the possibility of AI in its current state being used to replace junior positions.” Others lamented that their jobs, or aspects of their jobs, were being automated away. One market researcher said, “In terms of improving my capability, it's no doubt. [B]ut in the future AI may replace my work.” In some jobs, people felt it made their work harder. One software developer observed that “when AI arrived, the project managers started giving harder and harder tickets and bugs to solve.” Throughout this report, we use Claude-powered classifiers to infer people’s attributes and sentiments from their responses. For example, many participants mention their line of work in passing or give informative details about their work life, which allows us to infer their occupation. Similarly, we quantify concerns about job loss by prompting Claude to identify and interpret direct quotes in which respondents indicate that their own role is at risk of AI-driven displacement. We give example prompts in the Appendix . Respondents’ perceived threat from AI was correlated with our own measure of observed exposure , which reflects the percentage of a job’s tasks for which Claude is used. A respondent was more concerned about AI when our observed exposure measure for that respondent was higher. Elementary school teachers were less worried about their own displacement than software engineers, for example, consistent with the fact that Claude usage skews toward coding tasks. We show this in Figure 1 below. The y-axis is the percentage of respondents in a given occupation who said that AI is already replacing their role or is likely to do so soon. The x-axis is observed exposure. The plot shows that, on average, people in more exposed occupations tended to express more concern about their jobs being automated away. For every 10-percentage-point increase in exposure, perceived job threat increased by 1.3 percentage points. People in the top 25% of exposure mentioned the worry three times as often as those in the bottom 25%. Figure 1: Perceived job threat from AI and Observed Exposure. Percentage of respondents indicating some job threat from AI vs. the Observed Exposure measure from Massenkoff and McCrory (2026) . A respondent was coded as indicating job threat if they said their role was already being replaced or substantially reduced, or that such changes were likely in the near term (coded using Claude). The green line shows a simple linear fit. Another important worker characteristic is career stage. In previous research, we reported tentative signs of a slowdown in the hiring of recent graduates and early-career workers in the United States. For about half of respondents in this survey, we were able to infer career stage from their answers. 2 We found that early-career respondents were much more likely to express concern about job displacement than senior workers. Figure 2: Concern about economic displacement by career stage. Percentage of respondents indicating some job threat from AI, by career stage. Both fields are inferred from free-form responses using Claude-powered classifiers.

Who benefits from AI? Using Claude to assess the survey responses, we rated the extent of people’s self-reported productivity gains from AI on a 1–7 scale, where 1 is “less productive,” 2 is “no change,” and each subsequent level denotes a larger gain. Responses that scored 7 included testimonials like, “It used to take months to make the website I [made] in 4-5 days”; Claude gave a 5 to statements like, “What might have taken four hours was accomplished in half the time,” and a 2 to ones like, “Personally, I had AI help me fix code on a website. But it took multiple passes to get the result I was after.” 3 Overall, people reported meaningful productivity gains on average. The mean productivity rating was 5.1, corresponding to “substantially more productive.” Our respondents were, of course, active Claude users who were willing to take a survey. This could make them more likely to report productivity benefits than the average user. Some 3% reported negative or neutral impacts, and 42% did not give a clear indication on...