Anthropic employees believe that AI will make their labor obsolete. Most US workers don’t see their jobs that way at all.
The AI company published research on Friday that compares surveys with US adults against an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees. Most of the Anthropic staffers said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030, while only about 5% of the US workers felt the same.
The research, titled “The AI expectations gap,” shows the chasm between how the employees at the AI startup feel and how other American adults feel. Anthropic workers are far more optimistic about the progress of AI capabilities, how much it’s already saving time, and how fast the economy will grow.
The median Anthropic employee said that by the end of 2030, they expect AI to handle 95% of the work of building a new AI model.
Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s chief economist, wrote on X that the views might help outsiders prepare for more capable AI systems.
“We’re publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world,” he said.
Anthropic workers expect higher unemployment and extreme GDP growth
Anthropic’s surveys examined how workers already use AI and how they think it will change.
“US adults and Anthropic staff largely agree about what AI can do today,” the researchers wrote. “However, they disagree about how quickly it will improve, how widely it will be used, and how large the productivity gains measured by time saved will be.”
There are a few possible explanations for the discrepancies. Anthropic employees have larger budgets for the tools and often get access to unreleased models. US workers, on average, are more likely to work with their hands or in a service industry.
The researchers found that workers in manual trades, production, and transport thought AI would handle the least of their work by 2030, compared with Anthropic staffers, tech workers, and respondents in business and finance.
Most Anthropic employees surveyed said that they expect the unemployment rate to top 12% in 2030. The majority of the US workers thought it would hover around or under 8%. It’s currently 4.2%.
So far, researchers have found mixed evidence on AI disrupting the job market — a Yale team recently found it had mainly changed jobs, and had “no connection” to changes in unemployment.
The Anthropic researchers also compiled survey responses to estimate predictions on economic growth. Based on their answers, the median US adult’s guess for GDP growth in 2030 was 5.4%, compared with 17.1% among Anthropic employees. The country’s GDP grew by 2.2% last year.
Anthropic’s staffers are following their leader
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has become one of the industry’s most closely watched voices on labor upheaval. In March of 2025, he said he expected AI to write 90% of code within 6 months, and “essentially all of the code” within the year. He made more headlines that May, telling Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and lift unemployment to 10% or 20%.
Amodei expanded on that claim in a later essay, writing that he expects AI to be different from prior technological changes. He wrote that he expects an “unprecedented” short-term shock to labor, and that the economy will grow dramatically.
“AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans,” he wrote.
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