Anthropic’s head of economics answers our questions about AI and the job market

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

Business, News

4.6 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Will AI take my job? On today’s show, Anthropic’s head of economics Peter McCrory sits down with Kimberly to answer our burning questions about artificial intelligence’s effects on the labor market. We’ll get into what Anthropic’s research shows about how people are using the company’s chatbot Claude and what that could mean for the future of the global economy.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"Snap's stock jumps on plans to axe 16% of its workforce citing AI efficiencies" from CNBC
"Anthropic Economic Index report: Learning curves" from Anthropic
"Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence" from Anthropic
"Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption" from Anthropic
"Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath" from Axios
"Estimating AI productivity gains from Claude conversations" from Anthropic
"What 81,000 people want from AI" from Anthropic

We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.
0:13.0	Since the early days of the AI boom, we've all been trying to figure out how AI could affect the labor market and whether our own jobs are at risk and
0:22.6	potentially how soon. All sorts of research is being done on this, but the AI companies
0:28.0	themselves have a really unique view of how these tools are being used at work or at home.
0:34.1	One of these companies is of course anthropic, and for the past few years they've been doing research on how their chatbot Claude is being used and what that can tell us about AI's impact on the economy. So joining me in our DC studio today to talk about this is Peter McCrory, Anthropics Head of Economics. Peter, thank you so much for being here.
0:53.3	It's a privilege to be here. Thank you for the time.
0:55.7	I really appreciate your coming in on this very warm DC day. I want to start with some news from
1:01.9	this week. Snap announced that it's going to cut about 16% of its global workforce, around 1,000 people.
1:07.8	And they're saying they can do this because of AI efficiencies.
1:12.0	And we've seen lots of announcements like these.
1:14.4	And I feel like most people, when they're thinking about how AI is going to affect them,
1:20.2	this is what they're worried about, that they're going to lose their job because somebody
1:24.3	thinks that AI can do it better.
1:26.9	How real do you think that concern is?
1:29.3	It's a great question.
1:31.3	And I think entering to this conversation, it's important to have a degree of humility that there are so many other factors buffeting the economy at the moment.
1:40.3	We've gone through a period of time of the pandemic, the tight monetary policy
1:47.6	conditions, other sets of factors that have hit the economy. And we're in a heightened period
1:53.1	of economic uncertainty. And against that backdrop, there's an arrival of a new, very
1:58.1	consequential technology. The way I think about it is AI is a general purpose
2:02.4	technology. It's set to affect almost every single occupation in every sector of the economy. It's also
2:08.3	being adopted very quickly, both by individuals and by businesses. And it's improving very rapidly.
	...

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