A large-scale survey conducted by Anthropic shows that artificial intelligence is creating opposite impacts on the labor market, both helping to increase productivity and increasing concerns about job loss, especially in industries with high levels of automation.
The study was based on feedback from over 81,000 Claude users, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. The results showed that about 20% of participants expressed concern about the risk of being replaced by AI.
Notably, people working in fields where Claude can handle most of the work, such as software engineers, are the most worried group.
Meanwhile, occupations such as primary school teachers recorded lower levels of concern.
According to Anthropic, this reflects the fact that Claude is now mainly used in programming tasks and knowledge work.
The study focuses on analyzing the link between the level of exposure to AI and career risk perception, thereby showing that industries that are easily replaced by AI tend to be more insecure.
Notably, beginners are the group with a higher level of anxiety than long-term workers. This shows that AI not only affects current jobs but also affects career expectations in the future.
Besides the worry, AI also brings clear benefits in terms of productivity. When asked to evaluate, survey participants scored an average of 5.1 on a 7-point scale, corresponding to a "significant improvement".
Fields such as software programming and customer care recorded the highest productivity growth, while industries such as science or law have improved more modestly.
However, this benefit is not evenly distributed. Only about 60% of new workers believe they benefit from AI, while this rate in the senior expert group is up to 80%.
In addition, 10% of participants believe that AI mainly benefits businesses, as it allows employers to require more work from employees.
The survey shows that the clearest impact of AI is helping workers do more work in the same position, with 48% of participants choosing. In addition, 40% said AI helps them process work significantly faster.
These figures show that AI is mainly acting as a supporting tool, helping to increase efficiency and expand human working capacity, but not yet a complete replacement for labor.
Anthropic said it will implement the monthly "AI Economic Index" to monitor the impact of this technology on jobs, productivity and the labor market.
According to the company, combining qualitative data from users with actual usage data will help detect changes early before they appear in official statistics.
However, Anthropic also noted that the survey sample was mainly Claude's positive users, so there may be a tendency to have more positive assessments of AI than the general level.
In the context of rapid AI development, these results show that the labor market is entering a period of strong transformation, where opportunities and challenges go hand in hand.
