Exclusive: AI Could Double U.S. Labor Productivity Growth, Anthropic Study Finds

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.