Anthropic published research on Oct. 16 comparing how its own employees and U.S. adults expect AI to change work. In an internal poll of 1,334 staff, run Aug. 9 to 12, Anthropic employees said they expect far more of their jobs to be automated than the general public does.
On average, staff expect AI to be able to do 75% of their current work by 2030. U.S. workers put that figure at 28%. More than half of Anthropic staff expect AI to handle at least 80% of their work by 2030, compared with 5% of U.S. workers.
The median Anthropic employee expects AI to do 95% of the work of building a frontier model by the end of 2030, up from 51% today and 80% by the end of 2027.
The two groups reason about jobs in a similar way: people who expect AI to do more of their own work forecast higher unemployment. Respondents were told the current U.S. unemployment rate was about 4.2% and asked to forecast it for 2030. U.S. workers who expect AI to do less than half of their work predicted 7% to 8%. Those who expect AI to do 80% or more of their work forecast 12.2% on average, above the peak during the Great Financial Crisis. Across U.S. workers, every 10 additional percentage points of work that respondents expect AI to handle was associated with 0.4 points more forecasted unemployment.
Anthropic also released a companion study on how its own workforce has shifted. The share of junior employees in technical departments slipped from 21% in early 2025 to 14%. Among new technical hires, the junior share fell from 27% to 9%, and postings for junior roles have dropped particularly sharply since December 2025.
AI agents, meanwhile, are logging more hours. In March 2026, combined autonomous and interactive agent work hours passed human work hours at Anthropic for the first time, and by August interactive AI agent hours outnumbered employees’ six to one. Around a third of machine-learning managers and a fifth of software-engineering managers said they were hiring less because of AI.
Employees’ sense of their own productivity has also risen. In late 2024, 44% agreed that work processes at Anthropic made them as productive as possible, rising to 58% by November 2025. In an April 2026 survey, 20% described their role shifting from doing the work to managing Claude agents.
Both papers are on Anthropic’s site: “The AI expectations gap” and “How employment is changing at Anthropic.” Business Insider, which reported on the surveys, noted that researchers have so far found mixed evidence on AI’s effect on jobs, and that a Yale team recently concluded the technology had mainly changed tasks without any connection to unemployment shifts.
Anthropic said that as a company at the frontier of AI adoption, it could be a leading indicator of how AI will reshape work and hiring across the economy. The company has set up an early warning system to track jobs at risk of disruption and has prioritized moving affected employees into other roles internally.