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.

Proposals to tax robots have been debated by serious folks recently. The European Union considered but ultimately rejected the idea of taxing firms that use robots. And last week Quartz published an interview with Bill Gates in which he argues for a robot tax. These proposals follow a spate of recent articles on robots and automation, some of which argue there will be large job losses from robots and automation. These articles include one in the New Yorker, which profiled books by Martin Ford, Jerry Kaplan, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and David Autor's article on workplace automation in Journal of Economic Perspectives, among others.

In his final Twitter post as President Obama's deputy Chief Technology Officer, Ed Felten dryly notes one of his accomplishments: "Robot apocalypses: 0." Robots and automation have received lots of attention over the past year, with much of the interest ranging from alarmist to curious. Elon Musk has said that robots will take your job. And, at the recently concluded 50th annual Consumer Electronics Show, companies rolled out robots to monitor your child and brew your coffee and tea. Robots are everywhere, except, as it turns out, in the data. To be clear, I don't mean there's no data about robots.