Labor market impacts of AI:
A new measure
and early evidence
Published Authors
March 5, 2026 Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory
Acknowledgements
Ruth Appel, Tim Belonax, Keir Bradwell, Andy Braden, Dexter Callender III, Miriam Chaum, Madison Clark, Jake Eaton,
Deep Ganguli, Kunal Handa, Ryan Heller, Lara Karadogan, Jennifer Martinez, Jared Mueller, Sarah Pollack, David
Saunders, Carl De Torres, Jack Clark.
We additionally thank Martha Gimbel, Anders Humlum, Evan Rose, and Nathan Wilmers for feedback on earlier versions
of this note.
Labor market impacts of AI
Key findings
• We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that
combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting
automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily
• AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a
fraction of what’s feasible
• Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected by the BLS to grow
less through 2034
• 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
An overview of our method and some of our main results
See below for how we measure task coverage and the impacts of AI on unemployment.
Labor market impacts of AI 2
The rapid diffusion of AI is generating a wave of research measuring and
forecasting its impacts on labor markets. But the track record of past
approaches gives reason for humility.
For example, a prominent attempt to measure job offshorability identified
roughly a quarter of US jobs as vulnerable, but a decade on, most of those jobs
maintained healthy employment growth. The government’s own occupational
growth forecasts, while directionally correct, have added little predictive value
beyond linear extrapolation of past trends. Even in hindsight, the impact of
major economic disruptions on the labor market is often unclear. Studies on the
employment effects of industrial robots reach opposing conclusions, and the
scale of job losses attributed to the China trade shock continues to be debated.1
In this paper, we present a new framework for understanding AI’s labor
market impacts, and test it against early data, finding limited evidence that
AI has affected employment to date. Our goal is to establish an approach for
measuring how AI is affecting employment, and to revisit these analyses
periodically. This approach won’t capture every channel through which AI
could reshape the labor market, but by laying this groundwork now, before
meaningful effects have emerged, we hope future findings will more reliably
identify economic disruption than post-hoc analyses.
It is possible that the impacts of AI will be unmistakable. This framework is
most useful when the effects are ambiguous—and could help identify the most
vulnerable jobs before displacement is visible.
Counterfactuals
Causal inference is easier when the effects are large and sudden. The
COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying policy measures caused economic
disruption so stark that sophisticated statistical approaches were unnecessary
for many questions. For example, unemployment jumped sharply in the early
weeks of the pandemic, leaving little room for alternative explanations.
The impacts of AI, however, might be less like COVID and more like the
internet or trade with China. The effects may not be immediately clear from
aggregate unemployment data; factors like trade policy and the business cycle
could cloud interpretations of trendlines.
Labor market impacts of AI 3
One common approach is to compare outcomes between more or less AI-
exposed workers, firms, or industries, in order to isolate the effect of AI from
confounding forces.2 Exposure is typically defined at the task level: AI can grade
homework but not manage a classroom, for example, so teachers are considered
less exposed than workers whose entire job can be performed remotely.
Our work follows this task-based approach, incorporating measures of theoretical
AI capability and real-world usage, before aggregating to occupations.³
Measuring exposure
Our approach combines data from three sources.
• The O*NET database, which enumerates tasks associated with around 800
unique occupations in the US.
• Our own usage data (as measured in the Anthropic Economic Index).
• Task-level exposure estimates from Eloundou et al. (2023), which measure
whether it is theoretically possible for an LLM to make a task at least twice as fast.
Figure 1: Share of Claude usage by Eloundou et al. task exposure rating
This figure shows Claude usage distributed across O*NET tasks grouped by their theoretical AI exposure. Tasks
rated β=1 (fully feasible for an LLM alone) account for 68% of observed Claude usage, while tasks rated β=0
(not feasible) account for just 3%. Data on Claude usage comes from the previous four Economic Index reports.
Labor market impacts of AI 4
Eloundou et al.’s metric, β, scores tasks on a simple scale: 1 if a task can be
doubled in speed by an LLM alone, 0.5 if it requires additional tools or software
built on top of the LLM, and 0 otherwise.⁴
Why might actual usage fall short of theoretical capability? Some tasks
that are theoretically possible may not show up in usage because of model
limitations. Others may be slow to diffuse due to legal constraints, specific
software requirements, human verification steps, or other hurdles. For
example, Eloundou et al. mark “Authorize drug refills and provide prescription
information to pharmacies” as fully exposed (β=1). We have not observed
Claude performing this task, although the assessment seems correct in that it
could theoretically be sped up by an LLM.
That said, these measures of theoretical capability and actual usage are highly
correlated. As Figure 1 shows, 97% of the tasks observed across the previous
four Economic Index reports fall into categories rated as theoretically feasible
by Eloundou et al. (β=0.5 or β=1.0).
A new measure of occupational exposure
Our new measure, Observed Exposure, is meant to quantify: of those tasks that
LLMs could theoretically speed up, which are actually seeing automated usage
in professional settings? Theoretical capability encompasses a much broader
range of tasks. By tracking how that gap narrows, observed exposure provides
insight into economic changes as they emerge.
Our measure qualitatively captures several aspects of AI usage that we think
are predictive of job impacts. A job’s exposure is higher if:
• Its tasks are theoretically possible with AI
• Its tasks see significant usage in the Anthropic Economic Index⁵
• Its tasks are performed in work-related contexts
• It has a relatively higher share of automated use patterns or API
implementation
• Its AI-impacted tasks make up a larger share of the overall role⁶
Labor market impacts of AI 5
We give mathematical details in the Appendix.⁷ We count tasks that are
theoretically capable with an LLM as covered if they have seen sufficient work-
related usage in Claude traffic. We then adjust for how the task is being carried
out: fully automated implementations receive full weight, while augmentative
use receives half weight. Finally, the task-level coverage measures are averaged
to the occupation level weighted by the fraction of time spent on each task.
Figure 2: Theoretical capability and observed exposure by occupational category
This figure shows the share of job tasks that LLMs could theoretically perform (blue
area) and our own job coverage measure derived from usage data (red area).
Labor market impacts of AI 6
Figure 2 shows observed exposure (in red) compared to β from Eloundou et
al. (in blue), illustrating the difference between theoretical and actual use on
our platform, grouped by broad occupational categories. We calculate this by
first averaging to the occupation level weighting by our time fraction measure,
then averaging to the occupation category weighting by total employment. For
example, the β measure shows scope for LLM penetration in the majority of
tasks in Computer & Math (94%) and Office & Admin (90%) occupations.
The red area, depicting LLM use from the Anthropic Economic Index, shows
how people are using Claude in professional settings. The coverage shows AI
is far from reaching its theoretical capabilities. For instance, Claude currently
covers just 33% of all tasks in the Computer & Math category.
As capabilities advance, adoption spreads, and deployment deepens, the red area
will grow to cover the blue. There is a large uncovered area too; many tasks, of
course, remain beyond AI’s reach—from physical agricultural work like pruning
trees and operating farm machinery to legal tasks like representing clients in court.
Figure 3 shows the ten occupations most exposed under this measure. In line
with other data showing that Claude is extensively used for coding, Computer
Figure 3: Most exposed occupations
This figure shows the top ten most exposed occupations using our task coverage measure.
Labor market impacts of AI 7
Programmers are at the top, with 75% coverage, followed by Customer Service
Representatives, whose main tasks we increasingly see in first-party API traffic.
Finally, Data Entry Keyers, whose primary task of reading source documents
and entering data sees significant automation, are 67% covered.
At the bottom end, 30% of workers have zero coverage, as their tasks appeared
too infrequently in our data to meet the minimum threshold. This group
includes, for example, Cooks, Motorcycle Mechanics, Lifeguards, Bartenders,
Dishwashers, and Dressing Room Attendants.
How exposure tracks with projected job growth and
worker characteristics
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes regular employment
projections, with the latest set, published in 2025, covering predicted changes
in employment for every occupation from 2024 to 2034. In Figure 4, we
compare our job-level coverage measure to their predictions.
Figure 4: BLS projected employment growth from 2024–2034 vs. observed exposure
This is a binned scatterplot with 25 equally-sized bins. Each solid dot shows the average observed exposure and
projected employment change for one of the bins. The dashed line shows a simple linear regression fit, weighted
by current employment levels. The small squares mark individual example occupations for illustration.
Labor market impacts of AI 8
A regression at the occupation level weighted by current employment finds
that growth projections are somewhat weaker for jobs with more observed
exposure. For every 10 percentage point increase in coverage, the BLS’s growth
projection drops by 0.6 percentage points. This provides some validation
in that our measures track the independently derived estimates from labor
market analysts, although the relationship is slight. Interestingly, there is no
such correlation using the Eloundou et al. measure alone.
Figure 5 shows characteristics of workers in the top quartile of exposure
and the 30% of workers with zero exposure in the three months before
ChatGPT was released, August to October 2022, using data from the Current
Population Survey. The groups are very different. The more exposed group
is 16 percentage points more likely to be female, 11 percentage points more
likely to be white, and almost twice as likely to be Asian. They earn 47% more,
on average, and have higher levels of education. For example, people with
graduate degrees are 4.5% of the unexposed group, but 17.4% of the most
exposed group, an almost fourfold difference.
Figure 5: Differences between high and low exposure workers, Current Population Survey
This table shows exposure, demographics, education, and labor market outcomes.
Labor market impacts of AI 9
Prioritizing outcomes
With these exposure measures in hand, the question is what to look for.
Researchers have taken different approaches. For example, Gimbel et al.
(2025) track changes in the occupational mix using the Current Population
Survey. Their argument is that any important restructuring of the economy
from AI would show up as changes in distribution of jobs.¹ (They find that,
so far, changes have been unremarkable.) Brynjolfsson et al. (2025) look at
employment levels split by age group using data from the payroll processing
firm ADP, while Acemoglu et al. (2022) and Hampole et al. (2025) use job
posting data from Burning Glass (now Lightcast) and Revelio, respectively.
We focus on unemployment as our priority outcome because it most directly
captures the potential for economic harm—a worker who is unemployed wants
a job and has not yet found one. In this case, job postings and employment do
not necessarily signal the need for policy responses; a decline in job postings
for a highly exposed role may be counteracted by increased openings in a
related one. Most harmful labor market developments of AI should arguably
include a period of increased unemployment, as displaced workers search for
alternatives. The Current Population Survey is well suited to tracking this, as
unemployed respondents report their previous job and industry.
Initial results
We next study trends in unemployment, matching our occupation-level
measures to respondents in the Current Population Survey.8
A key question in interpreting our coverage measure is which workers should
be considered treated? Should changes in employment be expected from just
10% task coverage? Gans and Goldfarb (2025) show that if an O-ring model
best describes jobs, employment effects might be seen only when all tasks
have some degree of AI penetration. Hampole et al. (2025) argue that mean
exposure decreases labor demand, but concentration of exposure in only
certain tasks can counteract this. And Autor and Thompson (2025) highlight
the level of expertise required for the remaining tasks.
With an eye toward simplicity, and noting that we are most concerned with
large impacts, we center our analysis on the idea that impacts should be felt
Labor market impacts of AI 10
Figure 6: Trends in the unemployment rate for workers in the top quartile of observed exposure and no AI exposure,
Current Population Survey
The top panel shows the unemployment rate for workers in the top quartile of exposure (red line) and the 30% of workers with
zero exposure. The bottom panel measures the gap between these two series in a difference-in-differences framework.
most in the groups with the highest mean exposure. We compare workers in
the top quartile of time-weighted task coverage to those in the bottom. If AI
capabilities advance quickly, task coverage might be high for lower percentiles
of coverage, which might make an absolute threshold more helpful. But we
make the assumption that impacts should affect the most exposed workers
first, and present results varying the cutoff we use to define treatment.
The upper panel of Figure 6 shows raw trends in the unemployment rate since
2016 for workers in the top quartile of exposure and the unexposed group.
During COVID, the less AI-exposed workers—who are more likely to have
in-person jobs—saw a much larger increase in unemployment. Since then, the
trends have been largely similar between the two groups. The lower panel
measures the size of the gap between the most and least exposed workers in
a difference-in-differences framework, mirroring the findings from the raw
data. 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.9
Labor market impacts of AI 11
What kind of scenarios can this framework identify? Based on the confidence
interval of the pooled estimate, differential increases in unemployment on
the order of 1 percentage point would be detectable (this will change as new
data comes in, so it is merely a ballpark estimate). If all workers within the
top 10% of coverage were laid off, it would increase unemployment within
the top quartile group from 3% to 43%, and it would increase aggregate
unemployment from 4% to 13%.
A smaller but still concerning impact would be a scenario such as a “Great
Recession for white-collar workers.” During the 2007-2009 Great Recession,
unemployment rates doubled from 5% to 10% in the US. Such a doubling in
the top quartile of exposure would increase its unemployment rate from 3% to
6%. This should be visible in our analysis as well. Note that our core estimate
is based on differential changes in the unemployment rate in the exposed
group compared to the less exposed group. If unemployment increased for all
workers in parallel, we would not attribute this to AI advancements that still
leave many tasks unaffected.
One group of particular concern is young workers. Brynjolfsson et al. report a
6–16% fall in employment in exposed occupations among workers aged 22 to
25. They attribute this decrease primarily to a slowdown in hiring rather than
an increase in separations.10
We find that the unemployment rate for young workers in the exposed
occupations is flat (see Appendix). But slowed hiring may not necessarily
manifest as increased unemployment, since many young workers are labor
market entrants without a listed occupation in the CPS data and may exit the
labor force rather than appear as unemployed. To address hiring directly, we
use the panel dimension of the CPS, counting the percent of young (22-25 year
old) workers who begin a new job in a more vs. less exposed occupation over
time. Figure 7 shows the monthly job start rate (i.e., when a worker reports a
job that they did not have in the previous month) for young workers, split by
whether they are entering a high- vs. low-exposure occupation.
Apart from some large swings in 2020-2021, these series visually diverge
in 2024, with young workers relatively less likely to be hired into exposed
occupations. Job finding rates at the less exposed occupations remain stable
at 2% per month, while entry into the most exposed jobs decreases by about
Labor market impacts of AI 12
Figure 7: New job starts among workers age 22-25 in occupations with high observed exposure and
no AI exposure, Current Population Survey
The top panel shows the percent of young workers starting new jobs in high vs. no exposure occupations.
The bottom panel measures the gap between these two series in a difference-in-differences framework.
half a percentage point. The averaged estimate in the post-ChatGPT era is
a 14% drop in the job finding rate compared to that in 2022 in the exposed
occupations, although this is just barely statistically significant. (There is no
such decrease for workers older than 25.)
This may provide some signal of the early effects of AI on employment, and
echoes the findings from Brynjolfsson et al. But there are several alternative
interpretations. The young workers who are not hired may be remaining
at their existing jobs, taking different jobs, or returning to school. A further
data-related caveat is that job transitions may be more vulnerable to
mismeasurement in surveys.11
Discussion
This report introduces a new measure for understanding the labor market
effects of AI and studies impacts on unemployment and hiring. Jobs are
more exposed to AI to the extent that their tasks are theoretically feasible
Labor market impacts of AI 13
with LLMs and observed on our platforms in automated, work-related use
cases. We find that computer programmers, customer service representatives,
and financial analysts are among the most exposed. Using survey data from
the US, we find no impact on unemployment rates for workers in the most
exposed occupations, although there’s tentative evidence that hiring into those
professions has slowed slightly for workers aged 22-25.
Our work is a first step toward cataloging the impact of AI on the labor
market. We hope that the analytical steps taken in this report, especially
around coverage and counterfactuals, will be easy to update as new data on
employment and AI usage emerge. An established approach may help future
observers separate signal from noise.
There are several improvements to be made to the present work. Our usage
data will be incorporated in future updates, forming an evolving picture of
task and job coverage in the economy. The Eloundou et al. metric could also be
updated, to the extent that it is linked to LLM capabilities as of early 2023. And,
given the suggestive results around young workers and labor market entrants,
a key next step might be to look at how recent graduates with educational
credentials in exposed areas are navigating the labor market.
Data availability
Observed coverage at the task and job level is available at: [Link]
co/datasets/Anthropic/EconomicIndex.
Bibtex citation
@online{massenkoffmccrory2026labor,
author = {Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory},
title = {Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early
evidence},
date = {2026-03-05},
year = {2026},
url = {[Link]
}
Labor market impacts of AI 14
1
Job offshorability: Blinder et al. (2009) and Ozimek (2019); Government
growth forecasts: Massenkoff (2025); Robots: Graetz and Michaels (2018)
and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020); China shock: Autor et al. (2013) and
Borusyak et al. (2022).
2
Brynjolfsson et al. (2025) compare employment trends for workers in more
versus less AI-exposed occupations, using the task exposure measures from
Eloundou et al. (2023) and payroll data from ADP. Johnston and Makridis
(2025) do a similar task-based analysis using US administrative data, but
they aggregate treatment to the industry level. Hui et al. (2024) study how
freelance jobs on Upwork responded to the release of ChatGPT and advanced
image generation tools, comparing workers in directly affected categories
to those in unaffected categories before and after each tool’s release date.
Hampole et al. (2025) instrument for firm-level AI adoption using historical
university hiring networks: firms that historically recruited from universities
whose graduates later entered AI-related roles faced lower adoption costs.
3
Our task- and occupation-level exposure measures can readily incorporate
other usage data, and be extended to different countries. We intend to apply
this methodology to new settings over time.
4
In their framework, “Directly exposed’” tasks were those that could be
completed in half the time with an LLM (with a 2,000-word input limit and
no access to recent facts). Tasks that were “exposed with tools” were those
subject to the same speedup with an LLM that had access to software for, e.g.,
information retrieval and image processing. Tasks that were not exposed
could not have their duration reduced by 50% or more using an LLM.
5
We use the previous two Anthropic Economic Index datasets, covering
usage from August and November 2025. For ONET tasks that are highly
semantically similar, we split the counts across them.
6
There are judgment calls involved at every step. Should the Eloundou et
al. (2023) measure enter as {0, 0.5, 1} or something else? What determines
“significant” use? How do we handle tasks which seem very similar to those
with high usage, but are too rare to have been picked up specifically in the
Labor market impacts of AI 15
sampling for the Economic Index? How much more should automation
workflows count compared to augmentation? A reassuring finding which we
expand on in the Appendix is that the Spearman (rank-rank) correlation of
job exposure across many resolutions to these questions is exceedingly high.
7
Appendix available here.
8
To match O*NET-SOC codes to occ1990 codes in the CPS, we use the
crosswalk provided by Eckhart and Goldschlag (2025).
9
We explore this further in three ways in the Appendix. First, we ask whether
the percentile cutoff that we use to define treatment matters, varying it from
the median to the 95th percentile. In all cases, the impact is flat or negative
(meaning that unemployment decreases for the exposed group). Next, we
focus on young workers in particular, those aged 22 to 25 as in Brynjolfsson
et al. (2025). Finally, we use data on unemployment insurance claimants from
the Department of Labor to measure the unemployment, rather than CPS
survey responses. In ni extension do we find clear impacts on exposed jobs.
10
This range is wide because the authors provide estimates against multiple
counterfactuals. The 6 percentage point drop compares to a counterfactual
of flat employment growth. The 16 percentage point estimate comes from a
design comparing similar workers in the same firm with different occupations.
11
See Fujita, et al. (2024).
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