Anthropic staff expect 12% unemployment by 2030. The rest of America expects to still have a job.

Anthropic published research on Friday comparing what its employees believe about AI with what ordinary American workers believe. The gap is not small.

Most of the 1,334 Anthropic staff surveyed said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030. About 5% of US adults said the same. The median Anthropic employee thinks AI will be doing 95% of the work involved in building a new AI model before the decade is out. Most Anthropic staff also expect unemployment to breach 12% by 2030. Most US workers put it at 8% or under. It currently sits at 4.2%.

Anthropics chief economist framed this cheerfully, suggesting the company runs roughly eighteen months ahead of the rest of the economy and so its employees function as a useful early-warning system for everyone else. Which is one way to describe people who have spent years building the thing they now believe will hollow out the labour market.

There is something almost touching about the specificity of it. Not vague unease, not hand-wavy futurism. Actual percentage points. Dario Amodei's staff have done the maths on their own irrelevance and filed it neatly under research.