Anthropic Modeled Three Scenarios for US Economy Development through 2030

Published: September 10, 2026 – 09:54 UTC

Anthropic forecast the US economy through 2030.
Under one of the three scenarios — the most radical one — GDP would grow by 15% a year, but unemployment is also expected to hit record highs.
In turn, workers could lose part of their income, while most of the profits could shift to capital owners.

Anthropic has published a model of potential economic consequences of AI development through 2030. The company examined three scenarios — from a moderate impact similar to the internet’s effect to a radical economic transformation in which AI would perform almost all intellectual work.

The most extreme scenario projects US GDP growth of up to 15% a year, while also sharply worsening conditions for knowledge workers and potentially pushing unemployment to historically high levels.

Anthropic Showed Three Scenarios for Economic Development

Anthropic’s economics team created the Scenario Explorer based on the technical report Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. The model treats the economy as a set of tasks performed by people, software, and machines, and assesses which of them AI can augment, automate, leave unchanged, or create from scratch.

The company outlined three scenarios:

Modest — AI’s impact will be roughly comparable to the emergence of the internet. The economy will get an additional productivity boost, but it will remain within historical ranges
Substantial — by 2030, AI will be able to perform half of all intellectual work, mostly autonomously, but companies will not use it for all such tasks. The economy will grow at roughly twice the usual pace
Extreme — AI will become more productive than humans in the vast majority of intellectual tasks and will perform almost all such work autonomously. To realize this scenario, systems with recursive self-improvement and rapid AI deployment will likely be required

In the substantial scenario, US GDP by 2030 could reach about $36.3 trillion in 2025 dollars, compared with $33.5 trillion without accounting for AI’s impact. In the extreme scenario, the figure could rise to $44.4 trillion.

Anthropic gave the example of a nurse’s work. AI can help draft discharge instructions, remotely monitor patients, or plan care schedules, while some tasks — such as bathing a patient — cannot be performed by the technology on its own.

At the same time, the emergence of AI creates new responsibilities, including verifying the quality of automated patient triage or reviewing a treatment plan proposed by the model.

According to Anthropic’s estimates, the combined value of all tasks performed in the US economy today by people, machines, and software exceeds $30 trillion per year. Therefore, AI’s impact on individual tasks will directly affect GDP, employment, wages, and the distribution of income between workers and capital owners.

AI Can Accelerate Economic Growth, but Worsen Inequality

Anthropic notes that in all three scenarios, AI contributes to GDP growth, but the consequences for the labor market differ. In most cases, labor reallocation and unemployment will remain within historical ranges, while under an extreme trajectory of the technology’s development, unemployment could reach record levels.

Workers in knowledge-based professions face the greatest risk, as AI will be able to automate some of their tasks. Programmers, call center operators, and other specialists may need to retrain and move into jobs that are less prone to automation, but finding new work could take a significant amount of time.

Average wages will rise in all three scenarios, but workers will benefit to different degrees. In the substantial scenario, the incomes of knowledge workers will effectively remain unchanged, while in the extreme scenario they could fall by more than 10% by 2030, even as demand and wages in other occupations increase.

At the same time, large-scale automation could increase the share of income going to capital owners: currently, workers receive about 60 cents of every dollar of economic value, while capital receives 40 cents. In the extreme scenario, the overall economic “pie” will grow significantly, but workers’ share will shrink, and total labor income will barely change by 2030.

An Anthropic survey of more than 10,000 Americans in August showed that respondents’ typical expectations are closest to the substantial scenario: by 2030, GDP will be 10% higher than it would be without AI, and unemployment will rise to around 5%.

At the same time, the company emphasizes that the model is a simplification and does not account for a number of factors, including government responses, economic cycles, and financial shocks, so it plans to update it as new data becomes available.

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Source: Incrypted