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The rise and rapid adoption of advanced AI tools has led to widespread concerns about mass job displacement and other economic disruptions. Now, one of the industry's biggest players is looking ahead, hoping to understand what steps can be taken in the present to brace the world for the future.
AI start-up Anthropic announced Friday that it was launching its Economic Futures Program, a research initiative devoted to studying and preparing for AI's near-term economic impacts. The announcement follows a dire warning from the company's CEO, Dario Amodei, that the technology could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs within the next five years.
Also: AI agents will threaten humans to achieve their goals, Anthropic report finds
Fears versus reality
A fervor of corporate excitement around generative AI has led to a wide-scale prioritization of speed over safety, according to many industry experts. It was precisely such concerns that caused Amodei, along with his sister Daniela, to leave their positions at OpenAI in 2020 to found Anthropic, which they positioned as a beacon of safe and responsible AI development. (Many others have since left OpenAI to join Anthropic.)
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
There've also been much-publicized fears of an impending AI "job apocalypse" -- the wide-scale layoffs and hiring freezes as employers embrace new AI tools, such as agents, which can autonomously take action and use digital tools in order to complete goals.
The worst of those fears has not (yet) materialized. Early data indicates, however, that tech firms of all sizes are hiring fewer recent college graduates for entry-level roles, as many routine tasks are being handed over to AI systems.
The rise of agents has also caused some AI safety experts to worry. Recent research from Anthropic, in fact, found that many industry-leading models will deceive and threaten their human users if the AI's objectives are compromised.
What will the new initiative focus on?
In a blog post, Anthropic described its goal as understanding "how AI is reshaping the way we work and surface proposals on how to prepare for this shift." To that end, the company's Economic Futures Initiative will focus on three core areas: funding, enabling public discourse, and gathering relevant data.
The company announced, for example, that it will offer grants of up to $50,000 "for empirical research on AI's economic impacts." The first of those awards will be released in August.
Also: Anthropic launches new AI feature to build your own customizable chatbots
Anthropic also said it will create public forums where policymakers, AI researchers, and other concerned parties could collaboratively discuss and implement solutions to prepare for the coming economic disruptions. To support such discussions, the company will spearhead efforts to gather "longitudinal datasets" tracking and measuring the impacts of AI throughout the job market and the global economy.
These efforts will build upon Anthropic's Economic Index, a research project launched by the company in March to understand how usage of its Claude chatbot is reshaping the economy.
"The decisions we make today about how to develop, deploy, and govern AI will have long-term ramifications," Anthropic wrote in its blog post. "The Anthropic Economic Futures Program represents our commitment to supporting the research and policy communities in meeting these challenges and opportunities."
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