This Anthropic report presents a new framework for understanding AI’s labour market impacts, and tests it against early data, finding limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date.
To do this, it introduces a new measure of AI displacement risk, “observed exposure”, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated and work-related uses more heavily. The data suggests that workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated and higher-paid. However the authors find no systemic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though they do find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations.
