Anthropic's own economic model puts labor share as low as 45%

Anthropic put numbers on what AI could do to the US economy by 2030, and didn't stop at one forecast. The Economic Index's new scenarios, written by Anton Korinek, Chad Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter and Peter McCrory, lay out three paths. Modest puts GDP at $34.1T, up 1.6%. Substantial puts it at $36.3T, up 8.3%, with AI handling half of knowledge work. Extreme puts it at $44.4T, up 32.4%, built on 15% annual growth from systems that improve themselves.

The growth numbers aren't the story. Labor's share of that GDP is, and it moves the wrong direction as growth goes up. It runs 59.4% in Modest, 56.1% in Substantial, and 45.2% in Extreme, a 14-point drop in the scenario with the biggest economic upside. A number that low is the kind that shows up in fights over UBI, capital taxes and who owns the compute.

Anthropic sells the product that would drive the Extreme case. Putting a labor-share collapse in writing under its own name is a different move than a think tank running the same model. It's the company telling its own customers and regulators what happens if the product wins big, including the part where most workers don't share in it.

What the paper doesn't do is say which scenario Anthropic thinks is likely, or attach a probability to any of the three. It's a range, not a prediction, and the range spans an economy that still looks roughly like this one and one that doesn't.