Workers in just four percent of occupations use AI for three quarters of their tasks, according to research from Anthropic that explores how its Claude model is used.
The research found that roughly 36 percent of occupations incorporate AI for at least 25 percent of their tasks. These findings align with previous reports showing that few businesses have fully embraced the technology.
Of those seeking AI assistance, about 37 percent work in software engineering roles, 10 percent toil in fields related to media, the arts, and design, and nine percent are involved in education and library services.
Occupational roles in which AI is least useful tend to involve physical labor, such as transportation and material moving, healthcare support, and farming, fishing, and forestry occupations.
The study found 57 percent of AI use goes towards augmenting human work, and 43 percent automates work.
To understand how AI is impacting the economy, Anthropic, one of the top contenders in the commercial AI space behind OpenAI, has launched the Anthropic Economic Index.
Backed by a research paper [PDF] on the subject, the initiative looks at the impact AI is having on specific occupations, as defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics – which had not been disbanded by DOGE the last time we checked.
AI, the outfit says, is affecting people’s jobs, an issue that has prompted numerous studies in recent years and raised thorny socio-political questions about labor costs, wages, and the consequences of automation.
As France convenes its Artificial Intelligence Action Summit to discuss these issues, Anthropic is offering data on actual AI usage based on the prompts it receives from users of its software, with appropriate privacy protections, we’re assured.
To date, AI’s impact is not particularly broad but it has transformed certain jobs.
“Only ∼4 percent of occupations exhibit AI usage for at least 75 percent of their tasks, suggesting the potential for deep task-level use in some roles,” the paper states, citing foreign language and literature teachers as an example. “More broadly, ∼36 percent of occupations show usage in at least 25 percent of their tasks, indicating that AI has already begun to diffuse into task portfolios across a substantial portion of the workforce.”
While computer and mathematical occupations queried Claude the most, that job category accounts for only about 3.4 percent of US workers. The category office and administrative support was responsible for just 7.9 percent of prompts to Claude but represents the highest percentage of US workers, 12.2 percent, within the total workforce.
AI usage peaks in mid-to-high-wage occupations, notably IT-related jobs. But it drops off at both extremes of the salary spectrum – such as highly paid roles like physicians and lower-wage jobs like restaurant workers.
“Our empirical findings both validate and challenge previous predictions about AI’s impact on work,” Anthropic’s paper states. “Webb [2019, PDF] predicted highest AI exposure in occupations around the 90th wage percentile, while we find peak usage in mid-to-high wage occupations, with notably lower usage at both extremes of the wage distribution. This pattern suggests that factors beyond technical feasibility – such as implementation costs, regulatory barriers, and organizational readiness – may be tempering adoption in the highest-wage sectors.”
The Anthropic researchers also point to predictions from a 2023 research paper suggesting 80 percent of US workers could have at least 10 percent of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs. The AI giant says their data indicates only about 57 percent of occupations are using AI for at least 10 percent of their tasks, though they suggest that number could rise as AI adoption expands. ®
