Anthropic has built a model of how AI might reshape the US economy by 2030. Its most extreme case describes an economy roughly a third larger than it would otherwise be. That same case carries knowledge-work unemployment near 18 percent.
The company published the model on 10 September as an interactive scenario explorer, based on a technical report, “Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI” (Korinek et al., 2026). It does not predict which outcome will happen.
The scenario explorer treats every job as a bundle of tasks. AI can leave a task alone, augment it, automate it, or add new ones. The model then scales those effects across the economy under different assumptions about how capable AI becomes and how fast it is adopted.
The result is three AI economic scenarios, which Anthropic labels modest, substantial and extreme.
Three futures
