What Happens If AI Causes 25% Unemployment? Anthropic Has a Concept of a Plan

It seems to be one of the most pressing questions in the world of AI these days. If artificial intelligence tools cause massive disruptions in the economy and unemployment soars, what should AI companies and the government do about it?

Anthropic released a new economic policy framework on Wednesday that aims to tackle these questions, and the company has pledged $350 million to help work through solutions. But it remains to be seen how the federal government under President Donald Trump will respond.

“We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it,” Anthropic explained in releasing the new paper. “Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it.”

The company has three different proposals, one for a world with 5% unemployment, one with 10% unemployment, and one with so-called “unprecedented unemployment.” The current unemployment rate is 4.3%. The last time unemployment rose about 10% was in 2009, and before that in 1983. And the highest unemployment rate of the 20th century was during the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate hit 25% in 1933.

If unemployment only rises to 5%, Anthropic proposes the expansion of “new capital accounts seeded at birth,” and allowing young adults to benefit from them as well.

“Currently, these accounts can hold only index funds—not a stake in AI companies,” the company continued. “We also propose policies like workforce training grants, occupational licensing reform, and wage insurance, that make it easier for workers to find new roles and enter new industries.” Anthropic also proposes creating incentives for companies that retain and redeploy workers under the 5% plan.

The company explains in its paper that it’s unclear whether job disruptions will be a “temporary shock” or an “enduring restructuring, in which the demand for human labor is significantly and persistently lower.” But either way, Anthropic says something must be done.

“In the 10% scenario, our priority is expanded unemployment insurance, which we propose supplementing with sector-specific transition support and basic-needs relief,” Anthropic explains. “If AI does become a general substitute for human labor, policymakers will also need to consider the pace of its rollout, including by incentivizing firms to manage displacement gradually.”

Under the most dire “unprecedented unemployment” situation, which presumably means higher than 25%, Anthropic believes there will be a need for “income replacement,” as they call it, “for a large share of the workforce.”

“We’ll need new sources of tax revenue, and new ways of sharing this broadly, which might include basic income, sovereign wealth models, and equity-sharing mechanisms,” the company explains. “This scenario is novel economic territory, so we’re less certain about the right answers here.”

Anthropic claims in its paper that it’s not ready to advocate for specific policies in the worst-case scenario, but it says it’s investing in researching different mechanisms, like:

• “Potential revenue sources could include increasing the capital gains tax, broad-based consumption taxes, sector-specific levies on AI use (measured by tokens, compute, or revenue), and scalable “digital dividends” funded by taxes on the digital sector.”
• “Potential redistribution mechanisms could include universal basic income, AI sovereign wealth funds funded by investment stakes in AI-driven productivity, equity-sharing mechanisms giving workers partial ownership in AI enterprises, and dramatically expanded pre-distributive capital accounts building on existing models.”

Anthropic explains that the framework is U.S.-focused because they’re an American company, but that the principles are global.

“We hope to think through these questions with governments around the world, and to see them on the agenda at the G7 and the upcoming AI Summit in Geneva,” the company said.

From Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, every elected politician seems concerned with how AI will impact the job landscape. But even the AI companies can’t give you a concrete idea of how many jobs will ultimately be lost. Anthropic admits as much.

You may be asking yourself, as we did, how much Claude may have played a role in coming up with these ideas. We reached out to Anthropic but haven’t heard back. Gizmodo will update this article if we learn the answer. It would be appropriate, if a bit odd, to discover that AI is coming up with the “answers” on how to deal with large-scale unemployment caused by AI.

It’s also something Sam Altman envisioned years ago when he was asked how his company would make money. As he said in 2019: “We’ve made a soft promise to investors that, ‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.’”