Anthropic launches Economic Futures Program
The program funds empirical studies of AI's effect on jobs with grants of up to $50,000 and expands Anthropic's Economic Index into a longitudinal tracking tool.
- Money & business
- Government & policy
- Colour
Anthropic announced the Economic Futures Program, a research and policy initiative on artificial intelligence’s economic effects, built around three strands: research grants of up to $50,000 for empirical studies of AI’s effect on labour markets and productivity; policy symposia planned for Washington, DC and London later in the year, at which selected proposals would be presented to policymakers; and an expansion of the company’s existing Economic Index — a dataset built from anonymised Claude usage patterns — into a tool for tracking those effects over time.
Anthropic said the aim was to ground public debate about AI and employment in empirical data rather than projection, and offered API credits alongside grant funding, with initial awards expected in mid-August 2025.
The launch is a small entry in the record but marks a pattern: as AI’s labour-market impact moved from speculative to pressing through 2025, leading labs began funding the empirical research meant to answer the question themselves.