Anthropic launches AI job destruction detector as white-collar workers face rising exposure

'AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability': Anthropic launches new tool to warn us when jobs might lost to AI

Actual AI penetration is still far below its theoretical capability, Anthropic says * Anthropic's paper covers things like AI penetration and exposed occupations * Observed AI coverage is far below its theoretical capability, the data shows * Future research could explore how graduates are navigating employment Anthropic has published a new research paper discussing how it will be collecting real-world data on AI's impacts on the labor market - but this could be only the beginning. The Claude maker notes that where the data could really come into play is among researchers and policymakers, who may wish to act upon those insights to protect future workforces from major displacement. The paper explores data like theoretical versus observed AI penetration across job types, the most exposed occupations and differences in exposure levels. Anthropic is researching which jobs are at risk from AI Rather than strictly being a job loss warning scheme, Anthropic says the research could help companies identify areas where workers need upskilling support. However, while all of this sounds particularly damning of AI, early data suggests that AI hasn't actually caused any large-scale job losses despite the rapid adoption of chatbots and coding assistants. Anthropic says AI is more about augmenting human workers rather than fully replacing them. One of the datasets shown in Anthropic's post reveals not only the theoretical AI coverage across different occupations, but also the actual AI coverage. Management, business and finance, computer and math, life and social sciences, legal, arts and media, and office and admin are among the most likely to be affected, but the reality is that actual levels of AI penetration are several times lower. That being said, we are starting to see some changes, with hiring slowing amid uncertainty around how AI can actually help companies, particularly among entry-level workers. Looking ahead, Anthropic suggests further research into how graduates are navigating evolving hiring trends - more data and more context could suggest that they're finding opportunities elsewhere despite one set of data showing that entry-level roles are slowing, for example. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Anthropic launches AI job destruction detector

Why it matters: While the new index from Claude's maker shows "limited evidence" that AI has affected joblessness so far, the effort enters a larger debate among economists over how a possible "AI labor doom and gloom" scenario should be tracked in the first place. What they're saying: "By laying this groundwork now, before meaningful effects have emerged, we hope future findings will more reliably identify economic disruption than post-hoc analyses," Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory write in a new paper. * Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among the most vocal to warn about the economic disruption his own technology might sow. How it works: Anthropic's new measure takes into account: Zoom in: Jobs are more exposed when their core tasks could be automated by AI, and Anthropic's anonymized data shows those tasks are already being automated in the real world. By the numbers: Computer programmers (75% task coverage), customer service reps, data entry keyers and medical record specialists rank among the most exposed occupations, Anthropic says. * Its economists estimate roughly 30% of occupations don't clear the minimum threshold to register as "exposed" in their index. * Those are fields you might expect to be the least susceptible to AI disruption, given how human-intensive they are: cooks, lifeguards, dishwashers and the like. Yes, but: Workers in "most exposed" occupations have not become unemployed at meaningfully higher rates than workers in jobs considered AI-proof. * "The average change in the gap since the release of ChatGPT is small and insignificant, suggesting that the unemployment rate of the more exposed group has increased slightly but the effect is indistinguishable from zero," researchers write. * Anthropic does find "suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers" -- particularly ages 22 to 25 -- "has slowed in exposed occupations," a sign that certain entry-level workers are so far among the most affected by the uptake of AI. The big picture: Anthropic wants to build a roadmap for economists to track unemployment trends that might lurk underneath the surface, particularly among the most AI-exposed occupations. * The researchers note that the difference between current AI exposure and potential exposure is massive, raising the possibility of job turmoil down the line. The intrigue: Government agencies, which release what's considered the gold standard of economic data, are fine-tuning how they measure AI effects. * The Census Bureau adjusted how it surveys businesses about AI usage, a change that resulted in a sharp increase in the share of firms reporting current and expected use of the technology. What to watch: It's possible that AI disruption will be obvious -- like COVID-19's initial shock to employment -- potentially eliminating the need for intricate tracking tools. * Anthropic's economists say its measure will be most useful when the effects of AI disruption are "ambiguous" -- that is, other economic developments like trade wars cloud what's going on. Massenkoff tells Axios that the "China shock" in the early 2000s shows how major economic disruptions can take years to clearly show up in the data.

Anthropic Announces Jobs Most at Risk From AI

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The AI jobs apocalypse, long predicted by tech leaders and AI critics alike, has never felt closer. A major job market disruption has been rumored for years now, but given the latest swings on Wall Street and major layoffs roiling the tech industry, the alarm bells are starting to go off. It's looking likely that not every profession will be hit in the same way, nor to the same extent -- a topic that frontier AI companies have been studying intensely. Last week, while the company's CEO was engaged in a major fight with the Pentagon, Anthropic released its latest findings about the "labor market impacts of AI." The company found that while "AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability" and "actual coverage remains a fraction of what's feasible," many occupations are at higher risk of "AI displacement." By taking into consideration "theoretical [large language model] capability and real-world usage data," the team concluded that computer programmers, customer service reps, data entry keyers, medical record specialists, and market research analysts were at the highest risk since they were the "most exposed" to AI's capabilities. Other affected occupations include investment analysts, software quality assurance, and information security analysts, as well as computer user support specialists. Anthropic found that workers in these most exposed professions are "more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid," highlighting gaps around gender, education, and more as the effects of AI on the job market come into focus. The finding echoes previous research that similarly found women-dominated occupations are more vulnerable to AI disruption in the workforce. On the other end of the spectrum, the least exposed categories include professions that rely on a physical presence, and include cooks, mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders, dishwashers, and dressing room attendants, according to Anthropic -- noble careers, but not ones known for paying particularly well. There's nothing particularly new about the conclusion that programmers are far more at risk from being made redundant by AI tech. Silicon Valley titans have been laying off thousands of workers as they continue to double down on their sizable investments in data centers. Most recently, Twitter founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half the staff at his fintech company, citing "intelligence tools we're creating" that are allowing for "smaller and flatter teams." "Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes," Dorsey wrote in a statement on X-formerly-Twitter last month. But how much advancements in AI tech are really contributing to the layoffs remains a subject of heated debate. Former Block employees, for instance, have come forward to claim that the Dorsey-led layoffs were more likely an instance of "corporate downsizing" after a rash of pandemic-era overhiring. As Anthropic itself admits, we are still nowhere near AI's "theoretical capability," meaning the wave of job losses may not be due to AI automation. Then there's all of the noise that could make it extremely difficult to gauge how many jobs were actually lost to AI or due to other, unrelated factors, like rising geopolitical instability, for instance, triggering economic uncertainty. Nonetheless, the company's foreboding forecast highlights a rapidly changing labor landscape as colleges and universities face an existential threat, undermining the value of degrees. Computer science and computer engineering students, in particular, could be in deep trouble as employers continue to double down on AI. Instead, according to Anthropic's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, they'd be better served becoming electricians, registered nurses, lawyers, and accountants -- the occupations expected to grow the most between 2024 and 2034.

Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A 'Great Recession for white-collar workers' is absolutely possible | Fortune

The invention of electricity made menial jobs like the lamplighter, the elevator operator, and the knocker-up, the human equivalent to the modern alarm clock, irrelevant. The computer rendered the data entry clerk, the switchboard operator, and file clerks obsolete. Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company that emerged in 2026 as an existential threat to billions of market value, with each breathtaking new capability from its Claude model, is back with a warning about just how obsolete AI tools could make whole swathes of work. The AI giant, founded by former OpenAI workers who were obsessed with AI safety just as much as advancement, has been a thought leader on AI risk as much as advancement, and just published a study with the most detailed map yet of which jobs AI is actively performing versus which it merely could perform. The gap between those two numbers is both reassuring and alarming, depending on your line of work. In a report entitled "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence," authors Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory found that actual AI adoption is just a fraction of what AI tools are feasibly capable of performing. AI can theoretically cover most tasks in business and finance, management, computer science, math, legal, and office administration roles. However, in most sectors, actual adoption -- which the researchers measured using work-related usage data from Anthropic's AI model Claude -- is just a fraction of what's theoretically capable. Business leaders have for months heeded warnings about AI's ability to replace white-collar jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last year said the technology could disrupt half of entry-level white-collar work. Microsoft's AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, made a similar prediction, estimating most professional work will be replaced within a year to 18 months. The researchers attribute that lag to existing legal constraints and technical hurdles such as model limitations, the necessity of additional software tools, and the need for humans to still review AI's work. But that's just temporary, they project. The research introduces what it calls "observed exposure" -- a new metric that compares theoretical AI capability against real-world usage data, pulled directly from Claude interactions in professional settings. The finding that jumps off the page: AI is barely scratching the surface of what it's technically capable of doing. And when it does close that gap, the workers most at risk are older, highly educated and well paid. The workers who would bear the brunt of that scenario are not who most people picture. The most AI-exposed group is 16 percentage points more likely to be female, earns 47% more on average, and is nearly four times as likely to hold a graduate degree compared to the least exposed group. That's the lawyer, the financial analyst, the software developer, not the warehouse worker. Computer programmers, customer service reps, and data entry keyers are the most exposed occupations. But even those careers most exposed to AI's capabilities are not quite undergoing a job reckoning just yet. The researchers give the example of what they deem a fully exposed task commonly performed by doctors: the authorization of drug refills to pharmacies. AI can certainly automate this task, but they note they haven't yet observed Claude performing it even though it can theoretically be completed by a large language model. The results are striking. For computer and math workers, large language models are theoretically capable of handling 94% of their tasks. Yet Claude currently covers only 33% of those tasks in observed professional use. The same gap exists across Office and Administrative roles -- 90% theoretical capability, a fraction of that actually in use. The "red area," as the researchers describe it, depicting actual AI usage, is dwarfed by the "blue area" of what's possible. As capabilities improve and adoption deepens, the researchers write, the red will grow to fill the blue. At the other end, 30% of workers have zero AI exposure -- cooks, mechanics, bartenders, dishwashers -- jobs requiring physical presence that no LLM can replicate. Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, extrapolated the blue and red findings into a bar chart. "A universal truth: most radar charts should just be bar charts," he wrote on X. "Love your stuff, Anthropic!" The paper names the scenario everyone in the knowledge economy should be thinking about: a "Great Recession for white-collar workers," noting that during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the U.S. unemployment rate doubled from 5% to 10%. The researchers note that a comparable doubling in the top quartile of AI-exposed occupations -- from 3% to 6% -- would be clearly detectable in their framework. It hasn't happened yet, but it absolutely could. If you think this is an AI company talking their book, this is emerging as a clear possibility from many scenarios, far beyond viral doomsday essays such as that by Matt Shumer and Citrini Research. Federal Reserve Governor Michael S. Barr laid out the possibility among three scenarios he sees for AI adoption in a speech last month. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a dismal jobs report Friday. Employers shed 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. Some companies have recently announced massive layoffs attributed to AI. Jack Dorsey's Block last month cut nearly half its workforce, citing AI as a reason. "We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey wrote in a post on X. (Critics including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have noted that Block has particular issues of its own and may be "AI washing," or using this as an excuse to conduct necessary layoffs.) However, the research finds that for young workers at least, the problem is not layoffs but rather a slowdown in hiring within AI-exposed fields, a 14% drop in the job finding rate in the post-ChatGPT era compared to 2022 in exposed occupations. However, the researchers note those findings are just barely statistically significant. And there has so far been no systematic increase in unemployment, according to the research. Citadel Securities, not known for publishing market research, was moved by a viral doomsday essay to note that hiring for software engineers has actually increased in recent months. Still, the Anthropic researchers suggest that slight decrease may signal the new reality of employment in the AI age as it echoes other research on job market conditions for young workers. A similar study found a 16% fall in employment in jobs exposed to AI among workers aged 22 to 25. For some young workers, that means skirting the labor market entirely. "The young workers who are not hired may be remaining at their existing jobs, taking different jobs, or returning to school," the researchers said.

Politicians are starting to pay a lot more attention to the plight of white-collar workers

Blue-collar workers have been at the center of political messaging for years. Politicians meet with waitresses at a diner to pitch raising the minimum wage, tour a factory to spotlight job growth or tell stories of their family's hardscrabble bona fides while visiting cities like Detroit or Pittsburgh. Lately, though, a different group has been getting more attention: white-collar professionals. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is at the forefront of this development. The Republican governor expressed concern in August that "some of these white-collar jobs ... could end up being obsolete" due to advancements in AI. In September, he said the H-1B visa program was "especially galling" at a time when AI "is forecast to reduce a significant number of white-collar jobs." And in November, he worried about predictions that AI is "going to really undercut a lot of jobs -- a lot of white-collar jobs." "I don't think that's a good thing," he said, adding, "Why would we subsidize something that could potentially cause problems for folks?" DeSantis' political rise has been based in large part on his ability to see where the puck is going. He positioned himself as an early opponent of Covid regulations. And he was at the forefront of right-wing attacks on trans issues years before President Donald Trump made them part of his closing message in the 2024 campaign. Now, he's a leading political voice on AI skepticism ahead of a looming shift in U.S. politics in which the fears of white-collar workers -- a college-educated and increasingly Democratic demographic -- will be more pronounced. Other officials are sounding the alarm, too, including Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as well as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. This is a notable development in U.S. politics, which has long centered on the anxieties and grievances of blue-collar workers who for decades saw manufacturing jobs dwindle because of trade deals and automation. More recently, these workers helped power Trump's rise and led both parties to reorient their industrial policy, with calls to reshore manufacturing jobs and rebuild the nation's industrial base becoming central to Republican and Democratic campaigns. Former Rep. Brad Carson, D-Okla., said in an email he fears most political leaders will already be too late by the time they turn attention to the potential displacement of white-collar workers. "We spent decades watching manufacturing communities hollow out before politicians started paying serious attention, and by then the damage was permanent," said Carson, a former Defense Department official who is now one of the leaders of the super PAC Public First Action, which has called for more significant regulation of AI. "The difference this time is speed and breadth. White-collar displacement could move much faster and apply much more broadly than deindustrialization did, and these workers vote, donate and live in swing districts. So the political pressure will build quickly." "College-educated professionals in suburban districts whose mortgage payments are suddenly at risk are a very different political force than a hollowed-out factory town," he added. The concerns come as AI industry insiders openly say their technology will result in companies eliminating jobs. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, which built Claude, has predicted AI could increase unemployment by 10% to 20% within the next five years, while also eliminating half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. In October, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, whose company xAI developed Grok, said on X that "AI and robots will replace all jobs." The same month, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs in a statement that noted the "transformative" nature of AI. The following month, Musk said he believed "work will be optional" within two decades. A new NBC News poll found that 57% of voters think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, with a similar share of white- and blue-collar workers, as well as managers, expressing the same sentiment. The survey found that 74% of white-collar workers have used AI within the last two months, compared to 50% of blue-collar workers. As commerce secretary under President Joe Biden, Gina Raimondo became the administration's point person on AI, building relationships within the industry. She told NBC News the technology will "transform every industry," adding that the transition will be "brutal." A former governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo recalled when her father lost his job after manufacturing dried up in the state. She said that experience has shaped her views on AI. While she thinks "slowing down innovation is a bad idea," if certain demographics "get disproportionately hurt and we don't take care of them in this transition ... that's going to cause a level of societal, political and economic disruption that this country can't afford." Policymakers, she said, need to incentivize companies not to engage in mass layoffs and provide transition funding to employees who see their industries dramatically reshaped. Unemployment policy will need to be shifted from being focused on who is unemployed right now to being able to predict who's going to be unemployed in a year or more, she added. Much of this will need to start initially at the state level, where experimentation is easier. "What is fascinating to me," she said, "is how many policymakers of both parties and AI executives just kind of throw up their hands and they're like, 'Well, what are we going to do?'" There are already signs of a white-collar jobs recession. In November, a record 25% of unemployed workers had four-year college degrees. And a team of Stanford researchers released a report that found workers between ages 22 and 25 in industries with the most exposure to generative AI experienced a 16% relative decline in employment since late 2022. The U.S. shed 92,000 jobs in February, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marking the fifth time in nine months the job market has shrunk. Hawley, the senator from Missouri, said that during a recent trip to Vanderbilt University, he was struck by the college seniors who approached him to express how hard it was to find an entry-level job, noting employers said AI was making such positions unnecessary. "Now, how much of that is accurate and how much of that is just an excuse? Who knows," he said. "But if you look at the unemployment rate for recent college graduates, it is really startlingly high. And when you look at the economy nationwide, you've got to be concerned about the potential for job loss among white-collar workers." Hawley doesn't believe leaders in Washington are focusing on this as much as they should be. He pointed to legislation he introduced with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in November to track the number of jobs lost to AI as a first step. "We're looking at a massive collapse of the middle class," Hawley said. "We simply cannot allow that to happen." It's not all doom and gloom, though, for what AI will do to the white-collar job market. A number of economists, tech and political leaders have compared the rise of AI to past advancements that changed work rather than eliminated it. A common example cited is the growth of the internet, which created entire new industries. Meanwhile, others have said the projections by AI industry leaders are being made in part to make the technology seem more impressive to investors. Musk, who has made some of the boldest proclamations, is wrong so frequently that savvy bettors have profited by wagering against his projections. Trump and officials in his administration are among those who have sought to tamp down any panic around AI, the rapid upscale of which is a core piece of Trump's economic agenda. In an interview with NBC News last month, Trump pushed back on concerns that AI would kill jobs. "They said the internet was gonna do -- everything was gonna do -- robots are gonna kill jobs. Everything's gonna kill jobs," he said. "And you end up, if you're smart, doing great." An Economist/YouGov poll released last month found that 63% of U.S. adults believe AI advances will lead to an overall decrease in jobs, roughly twice the percentage who told an NPR/Kaiser/Harvard Technology survey in 1999 they believed the internet would reduce jobs. Nathan Brand, a Republican strategist, said fears over AI-fueled job losses are misguided. For starters, he said, an increased demand for infrastructure and energy driven by the industry will trigger blue-collar job growth that in turn boosts white-collar jobs. "Politically, it's going to ultimately fall back into these camps of innovation versus no innovation," Brand said. "Traditionally, conservatives have been on the side of innovation." AI's effect on politics is still in its infancy. There aren't yet clear partisan divides on AI-related issues as leaders find their footing. The biggest issues elected officials have focused on so far are not jobs but electricity bill hikes tied to the rapid expansion of AI data centers, child safety and the use of AI in the military. Policymakers have been more focused on issues such as data center-related costs because they have a more widespread effect than the job prospects for white-collar professionals, Raimondo said. Additionally, with many white-collar workers making comfortable wages, "it's harder to feel bad for them," she noted. "But I do believe that that will change ... if law firms stop hiring lawyers, or if accounting firms cut their accounting staff in half," she said. "You're going to see a change pretty fast." In a new report, Anthropic found that the jobs with the most exposure to AI, and therefore at the greatest risk of AI displacement, include computer programmers, customer service representatives and financial and investment analysts, among other white-collar professions. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he has contemplated working on more legislation directly related to the potential job impacts of AI but is not yet sure of the right approach. "There's a lot of well-founded focus on the dangers of AI in weapons or consumer goods, whether it's lack of privacy or arms that may be out of control," Blumenthal said. "But this employment challenge may be the one that breaks through with everyday Americans, because [while] the other dangers may seem hypothetical, this one is going to be real." On the campaign trail, competing super PACs backed by the AI industry are starting to pour money into key midterm races while potential 2028 presidential contenders like DeSantis have contrasted themselves with possible rivals on AI. Alex Bores, a member of the New York state Assembly who is running for Congress in the hotly contested 12th District, said Americans are now "learning that no job is safe." Bores is proposing new regulations on the AI industry and is supported and opposed by rival AI-funded super PACs. "I don't know that, historically, when you have large sudden unemployment, specifically among young people, especially among men, that that leads to a more inclusive, progressive, fact-based politics," said Bores, a Democrat. "That often leads to a very reactionary politics. And I worry quite a bit about what that might do to our political debate." Several elected officials who spoke with NBC News said a potential white-collar job displacement could echo the "China shock" that rattled the blue-collar job market decades ago. In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization, unleashing a surge of imports into the U.S. and spurring manufacturing job losses. That followed a 30-year stretch in which cities and towns, many located in the Rust Belt, saw their manufacturing industries and populations collapse amid increasing globalization and automation. Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive House candidate running in California's 11th District, said AI industry workers he's spoken with believe the government may need to take equity stakes in these companies to get a better handle on issues like a potential white-collar displacement. "We haven't had a situation in the past where automation has come after the highest-earning workers first," Chakrabarti said. He noted that the white-collar workforce -- concentrated in metropolitan areas -- is "a politically powerful bloc of our society." In terms of party identification, white-collar workers lean Democratic by 8 percentage points in the latest NBC News poll while blue-collar workers tilt Republican by 9 points. For Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents a district centered in Silicon Valley, it's critical for leaders to "unite the anxiety of blue-collar workers and white-collar workers" rather than pit them against each other. Khanna and Sanders last month appeared at Stanford for a joint town hall on AI policy where Khanna laid out his AI agenda, which includes a federal jobs guarantee for young Americans and those seeking entry-level jobs. In October, Sanders released a report finding that AI and automation could eliminate roughly 100 million blue- and white-collar jobs over the next decade. "The threat to jobs are no longer just blue-collar jobs," said Khanna, a potential 2028 presidential candidate. "It's also white-collar jobs, and that creates a coalition that can appeal to factory towns, rural America and suburban towns as well as urban centers." Hawley, another potential 2028 candidate, has for years positioned himself in the Senate Republican caucus as an outlier on economic policy. He said a lesson leaders need to take from the breakdown of American manufacturing jobs decades ago and apply to the coming potential white-collar job displacement is that "the importance of good-paying work cannot ever be lost or taken for granted." "What we learned out of that is [job displacement] destroys entire communities," he added. "It destroys families. It destroys the fabric of the country. Work is absolutely vital. People have to be able to get good-paying work on which they can raise a family. And we've got to put that at the center of our AI policy."

Anthropic is tracking which jobs are most exposed to AI. These 10 professions top the list.

Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting. Anthropic, the maker of the AI chatbot Claude, says it has built an early warning system to track which U.S. jobs are most exposed to artificial intelligence -- and its initial findings suggest many white-collar roles sit near the front lines. The company's new research comes as fears mount that AI is taking work away from young job-seekers. Older white-collar workers are fretting about their long-term job security in the face of ever-capable generative AI tools and recent layoffs from corporations such as Amazon and Block that have cited AI. Anthropic's researchers tracked the gap between AI's capabilities and how the technology is actually being used by workers across professions. The analysis found "limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date." Early fears that AI is responsible for rising joblessness among young college grads may also be overblown, the researchers said, noting only "suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations." But despite the finding that AI has so far had little measurable impact on the labor market, the researchers said the technology could eventually have a seismic effect on many professions, from lawyers to sales reps. To determine a job's exposure, Anthropic compared AI's ability to perform specific tasks with how common those tasks are across professions. Jobs are made up of many tasks, with some of them easily replaced by AI, while others are difficult to replace. Take teaching, where an AI chatbot could grade homework but wouldn't be able to manage a classroom of children, the researchers noted. Anthropic said a job's "exposure" is based on the percentage of its tasks that artificial intelligence could potentially speed up or help perform. These are the 10 professions Anthropic identified as most exposed to AI: Professions that are considered to be more "exposed" to artificial intelligence are projected to grow more slowly through 2034, Anthropic found, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Workers in these professions are more likely to be "older, female, more educated and higher-paid," Anthropic researchers noted. That aligns with previous research that found women-dominated occupations are deeply vulnerable to AI, such as administrative assistants and clerks. The least exposed occupations tend to require physical abilities. Jobs such as groundskeepers, cooks, motorcycle mechanics, lifeguards and bartenders ranked among those with the lowest exposure.

Anthropic Identifies the Jobs Most Exposed to AI Risks -- Is Your Occupation Affected?

Get personalized, AI-powered answers built on 27+ years of trusted expertise. The workers most at risk from AI aren't those earning the lowest wages, but are among the best-paid, best-educated professionals in the U.S., a new study from Anthropic has found. Unlike past waves of automation, which hit blue-collar workers hardest, AI appears to be targeting so-called "knowledge work," and the people who do it for a living may be more vulnerable than cashiers and cooks who earn far less than them. Almost three-quarters of a computer programmer's core job tasks, for instance, are already being handled by AI -- not someday, but in how it's used today. The study arrives as many Americans worry that AI automation may cost them their jobs, even as most research has been theoretical about which tasks AI might handle, with the most robust studies thus far showing limited effects on employment. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, is among the few organizations with direct access to real-world AI usage data at scale, making this among the more important studies on AI's effect on jobs to date. Anthropic's study ranks computer programmers first, with AI being observed covering about three-quarters (74.5%) of their tasks. Customer service representatives follow at 70.1%, driven largely by AI handling customer inquiries through company . Data entry keyers (67.1%), medical records specialists (66.7%), and financial and investment analysts (57.2%) round out the most exposed occupations. Most striking about this list is that these aren't the low-skill roles policymakers have historically worried about most in discussions about automation. Workers in the most exposed occupations earn about 47% more than workers in jobs with zero AI exposure, are far more likely to hold graduate degrees -- 17.4% vs. 4.5% in the zero exposure group -- and are 16 percentage points more likely to be female. That's because AI is targeting knowledge work, the kind involving analysis and writing. Many studies on the risks to jobs from AI have addressed what's really merely a theoretical question: what tasks might AI take over from workers? Anthropic researchers Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory took a different approach, creating a measure called "observed exposure" to track which tasks Claude is automating in real-world, work-related settings. Their measure gives more weight to cases where AI replaces a worker's output than to cases where AI simply assists them, giving a better sense of which workers are most likely to be replaced. Most AI-related automation remains theoretical, even as many, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are convinced that AI will replace jobs up and down the corporate ladder, rendering many jobs obsolete. According to the Anthropic study, AI could perform 94% of the tasks in computer and math occupations. But, in practice, Claude is covering only about a third of those tasks. Legal work has often been mentioned as particularly vulnerable to AI, but Massenkoff and McCrory found relatively little automation thus far in that field. But those in the legal, computer and math-based professions shouldn't break out the champagne just yet: This could mean, as Anthropic's researchers put it, that "AI is far from reaching its theoretical capabilities." As AI's deployment in the economy broadens, that gap should narrow, they argue, and so will job security in the occupations where it does. Mass layoffs from AI have yet to hit the most exposed workers identified by Anthropic. In line with previous research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Yale Budget Lab, Massenkoff and McCrory's analysis of federal Current Population Survey data found no meaningful increase in unemployment rates for these workers since launched in late 2022. But many have pointed out that worrying signs for the future of the labor market could be at its entry point. Among workers ages 22 to 25, the rate of starting a new job in a high-AI-exposure occupation has fallen about 14% compared with 2022. Workers over 25 show no such pattern, the study found. But Massenkoff and McCrory said there might be other reasons for these changes among the younger cohort of workers, noting that "the young workers who are not hired may be remaining at their existing jobs, taking different jobs or returning to school." For now, computer programmers, customer service workers, financial analysts and medical record specialists are the occupations to watch -- not because AI-caused mass layoffs are imminent, but because the data has already started to move.

AI yet to trigger job losses but early signs of slower hiring for younger workers: Anthropic study - The Economic Times

AI's reach is still limited, a new study shows. While AI has not caused widespread job losses, younger workers in exposed jobs see hiring slow. White-collar roles involving coding and data analysis are most affected. Jobs needing manual skills are least susceptible. The study compares AI capability to actual use.AI's actual coverage remains a fraction of what is feasible, and while artificial intelligence has not yet triggered a systematic rise in unemployment in occupations most exposed to the technology, hiring of younger workers in such roles appears to have slowed, according to a new study by AI firm Anthropic. Released by the San Francisco-headquartered AI startup behind the Claude chatbot -- and now a company in the crosshairs of the US administration -- the report crunches labour market data alongside real-world AI usage. The report 'Labour market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence', found that white-collar, knowledge-based occupations are the most exposed to AI, particularly roles involving coding, information processing, analysis and routine digital tasks. In fact roles such as computer programmers, customer service representatives, data entry keyers, market research analysts and financial, and investment analysts are among the most exposed occupations because many of their tasks can already be automated or accelerated by large language models. In contrast -- and on expected lines -- jobs requiring largely manual abilities seem to be least susceptible, including occupations such as cooks, motorcycle mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders and Dressing Room Attendants. "AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what's feasible," the study said, citing the key findings. Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected by the BLS (US' Bureau of Labor Statistics) to grow less through 2034, it said, adding that workers in the most-exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid. "We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations," the report said. Most measures of AI exposure focus on what is theoretically possible. But there is a large gap between capability and deployment, Anthropic study said asserting that it compared theoretically LLM capability to actual automated usage across occupations. Anthropic has been dominating headlines in recent weeks, with its popularity surging on the back of its ability to automate a wide range of tasks -- from generating code to analysing data -- promising more streamlined workflows while stoking fears of a potential shake-up in the job market. The AI firm has also been in the spotlight amid a standoff with the US Department of Defense over concerns about how American agencies might deploy its technology, including in autonomous weapons systems or for large-scale domestic surveillance -- a discussion that has since become more heated amid the war in West Asia. Last week, US administration directed all federal agencies to immediately halt the use of Anthropic's technology, deeming it a supply chain risk after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's moral stance. The standoff with the US government notwithstanding, Anthropic has seen a notable spike in consumer downloads over the past week, as several users rallied behind the company's firm stance against weaponisation of AI. The company said more than one million people signed up for its Claude chatbot each day this week, pushing the app ahead of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to become the top AI app in over 20 countries on Apple's App Store. The clash with Pentagon has also intensified Anthropic's rift with OpenAI, which recently announced a deal with the US defence department to deploy ChatGPT in classified environments, effectively displacing Anthropic's technology.

Anthropic finally reveals which jobs AI cannot replace

Everyone has an opinion on which jobs AI will kill first. Now Anthropic has actual data, and the answer is more nuanced than the doomsday crowd wants to admit. The company published new research on March 5 introducing a metric called "observed exposure," which tracks how Claude is being used in real workplaces, not just what it could theoretically do. Turns out those two things are very different, and that difference is where millions of jobs are still sitting comfortably. For coders, customer service reps, and data entry workers, though, the numbers are harder to ignore. What the Anthropic Economic Index actually measured To build this, Anthropic's team pulled from three sources: the O*NET database covering roughly 800 U.S. occupations, Claude's own usage logs, and a 2023 academic framework that scores whether an AI can cut a task's completion time in half. Every job ends up with a coverage score. High score means AI is already doing a real chunk of that job's tasks. Zero means it hasn't shown up in the data at all. Here's the part that surprises people. AI could theoretically handle 90% of tasks in office and admin roles. But in practice, observed usage covers only about a third of computer and math jobs, which are already the most penetrated category. The gap between capability and reality is enormous. These jobs already feel the pressure of AI Computer programmers top the list at 75% task coverage. Claude is being used heavily for coding, and that usage is leaning toward full automation, not just helping programmers work faster. Customer service reps come in second. Their core tasks are increasingly showing up in first-party API traffic, which is a technical way of saying companies are quietly replacing human agents with AI pipelines. Data-entry workers are third at 67% coverage. Reading documents and entering data is exactly what AI does quickly and cheaply, and businesses have noticed. Other high-exposure occupations include: * Financial analysts, whose modeling and number-crunching work is heavily covered * Office administrators, facing 90% theoretical exposure, even if real adoption still lags * Computer and math workers broadly, where observed exposure sits at 33% and climbing The Bureau of Labor Statistics backs this up independently. Its employment projections through 2034 show that for every 10 percentage point increase in a job's AI coverage score, projected growth for that role drops by 0.6 percentage points. Not catastrophic, but the direction is clear. The jobs AI still cannot touch About 30% of U.S. workers score a flat zero. Their tasks simply do not appear in AI usage data at any meaningful level. And before anyone assumes these are low-skill jobs, look at the list. These are roles built around physical presence, sensory judgment, and reading the room in real time. A language model has no body, no hands, and no instincts. Those still matter. Zero-exposure occupations highlighted in the research: * Cooks, whose work involves knife skills, tasting, and plating judgment no model can replicate * Motorcycle mechanics, who diagnose engines through hands-on inspection * Lifeguards, whose job is scanning water and executing physical rescues * Bartenders, who read crowds and social dynamics in real time * Dishwashers and dressing-room attendants, handling wet, physical, unpredictable tasks * Agricultural workers pruning trees and operating farm machinery outdoors * Courtroom lawyers, whose work demands physical presence and live advocacy The BLS projects steady growth for blue-collar roles through the decade. Health care is adding roughly 40,000 jobs a month, with demand for nurses, therapists, and care workers running well ahead of anything AI is displacing. Who faces the greatest AI threat, and what it means for the workforce Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for a lot of people. The workers most at risk are not who you might expect. Using Current Population Survey data from just before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, researchers found that the highest-exposure workers tend to be older, more educated, female, and significantly better paid, earning about 47% more than their zero-exposure counterparts. Every previous automation wave hit lower-wage workers first. This one is lining up differently, aiming squarely at white-collar professionals who spent years and money building credentials for office-based careers. That said, there is no unemployment crisis to report yet. The study finds no measurable rise in joblessness among high-exposure workers since ChatGPT launched. Even a "Great Recession for white-collar workers" scenario, where unemployment in exposed fields doubled from 3% to 6%, would show up clearly in their framework. It has not appeared. The crack is showing up in hiring instead. Among workers aged 22 to 25, the monthly job-finding rate in high-exposure occupations has fallen roughly 14% since ChatGPT's arrival. The drop is barely statistically significant, but it echoes what separate researchers tracking ADP payroll data have been flagging for months: Young people trying to break into exposed fields are finding fewer doors open. What this means for markets and policy Investors are already repositioning. Health care and utilities are pulling in overweight allocations from institutional money as white-collar AI fears grow. Software-heavy tech is facing the other side of that trade. The Nasdaq slipped about 1.2% in the session after the report circulated. Policymakers are moving too, if slowly. Retraining programs targeting trades and care fields are gaining real traction. On the table right now: tax credits for physical-trade apprenticeships, immigration pathways to fill care-sector gaps, and wage subsidies for frontline jobs where AI pressure is low. Anthropic's researchers are careful to call this a first step, not a final verdict. They plan to keep updating the coverage measures as usage data evolves and will watch closely whether that youth hiring slowdown deepens. The honest answer right now is that AI-fueled mass displacement has not arrived. But the early signals are pointing in one direction, and anyone paying attention to where younger workers aren't getting hired should probably take note. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published March 8, 2026 at 5:37 PM.

Is your job at risk from AI? Anthropic's new study measures real displacement risk

Most studies measuring AI's impact on jobs have one thing in common: they measure what AI could do, not what it's actually doing. A new study from Anthropic changes that and the results are more unsettling in some places, and more reassuring in others. Also read: 'Safety Theater': Why Anthropic's CEO says OpenAI's DoW deal is a betrayal of AI safety The research introduces a new metric called observed exposure, a tool that tracks real AI usage across hundreds of occupations, weighting automated and work-related tasks more heavily than casual or augmentative use. It's a meaningful shift from previous models that tended to ask "could AI do this job?" rather than "is AI doing these tasks right now, at scale?" The findings are striking in places. Computer Programmers face the highest displacement risk, with 75% of their core tasks now covered by AI in real usage. Customer Service Representatives and Data Entry Keyers follow closely. These roles share a common thread: repeatable, task-heavy work that AI handles well in automated settings. At the other end of the scale, Cooks, Bartenders, Lifeguards and Motorcycle Mechanics show zero measurable exposure, their work remains stubbornly human for now. Also read: Is ChatGPT Health safe? Study finds AI missed half of medical emergencies Perhaps the most surprising finding is how far AI still lags behind its own potential. Even in the heavily exposed Computer and Mathematics sector, AI currently covers just 33% of tasks - a fraction of what is theoretically possible. The capability exists; widespread adoption hasn't caught up yet. The demographic picture is equally unexpected. The most exposed workers tend to be better educated, higher paid, and more likely to be female. Graduate-degree holders are nearly four times more represented in high-exposure roles than in low-exposure ones. This quietly dismantles the assumption that AI primarily threatens low-wage, low-skill workers. As for whether AI has actually cost people their jobs, the evidence remains limited. Anthropic found no significant rise in unemployment among highly exposed workers since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. There is one early warning signal worth noting, however: workers aged 22 to 25 appear to be getting hired into exposed roles at a noticeably slower rate. It may be the first concrete sign that AI is beginning to reshape who gets a foot in the door. The disruption, it seems, is coming. It's just arriving more quietly and hitting different people than most of us expected.