Anthropic Institute Agenda

Focus areas for The Anthropic Institute \ Anthropic Policy Focus areas for The Anthropic Institute May 7, 2026

At The Anthropic Institute (TAI), we’ll be using the information we can access from within a frontier lab to investigate AI’s impact on the world, and sharing our learnings with the public. Here, we’re sharing the questions that drive our research agenda. Our agenda focuses on four areas for research: Economic diffusion Threats and resilience AI systems in the wild AI-driven R&D

In Core Views on AI Safety , we wrote that doing effective safety research required close contact with frontier AI systems. The same logic applies to doing effective research on AI’s impacts on security, the economy, and society. At Anthropic, we can see early evidence that jobs like software engineering are changing radically. We’re watching the internal economy of Anthropic start to shift, new threats emerge from the systems we build, and early signs of AI contributing to speeding up the research and development of AI itself. In order to realize the full benefits of AI progress, we want to share as much of that information as we can. We’re researching how these dynamics might shape the outside world, and how the public can help direct those changes. At TAI, we’ll study AI's real-world impacts from our position within a frontier lab, then publish those findings, to help external organizations, governments, and the public make better decisions about AI development. We’ll share research, data, and tools to make it easier for individual researchers and institutions to work on these research questions. In particular, we’ll share: More granular information from The Anthropic Economic Index , at a higher cadence, about what we’re seeing in labor impacts and usage of AI. We’ll try to be an early warning signal for significant change and disruption. Research on the societal areas most in need of investment in resilience in the face of new AI-enabled security risks. More detailed information about how our work at Anthropic has sped up as a result of new AI tools, and ideas about the implications of potential recursive self-improvement of AI systems.

TAI will shape the decisions Anthropic makes. That may look like the company sharing data with the world that it otherwise would not (like the Economic Index), or approaching how it releases technology differently (like cyber threat analyses which feed into initiatives like Project Glasswing ). We expect that work developed by The Anthropic Institute will increasingly serve as important inputs to Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT). The LTBT’s mission is to ensure that Anthropic continually optimizes its actions for the long-term benefit of humanity. We’ve developed this research agenda with the LTBT, as well as with staff across Anthropic. This is a living agenda, rather than a fixed one. We'll continue to fine-tune these questions as evidence accumulates, and we expect new questions to emerge that aren't captured here today. We welcome feedback on this agenda, and will revise it in light of what we learn through our conversations. If you are interested in helping us answer some of these questions, we welcome your application to become an Anthropic Fellow. The Fellowship is a four-month funded opportunity to tackle one or more of these questions with mentorship from TAI team members. You can find out more and apply to the next cohort here . Our research agenda: Last updated: May 7, 2026 Economic diffusion It’s crucial to understand how the deployment of increasingly powerful AI systems changes the economy. We also need to develop the necessary economic data and predictive ability to choose to deploy AI in ways that benefit the public. To answer the questions in this pillar of our research, we’ll further develop the data within The Anthropic Economic Index . We’ll also explore other methods to sharpen our models of how powerful AI could affect society, whether by driving job loss, unprecedented economic growth, or other effects. AI adoption and diffusion Who adopts AI? AI development is concentrated in a small number of companies in a small number of countries, but deployment is global. What determines whether a country, region, or city can access AI? If it can access it, how does it capture economic value from AI? What policies and business models meaningfully shift that balance? How do free or open weight models contribute to this dynamic? Adoption in firms: What causes AI adoption at the firm level, and what are the consequences? How does AI change the scale at which a firm or team can be most efficient? How concentrated is AI usage across firms? How do changes in concentration of AI adoption translate into markups and labor share? If a 3-person team or company can now do what required 300 before, what happens to industrial organization? Or, if firms can more easily centralize knowledge and there are benefits from doing so at scale, will we see larger, more expansive firms with a greater incentive to systematically surveil workers? Is AI a general purpose technology? Is AI following the pattern of previous “general purpose technologies,” where adoption is fastest in high-margin commercial applications, and slowest where social returns exceed private returns? Are there policies or decisions that could change these dynamics?

Productivity and economic growth Productivity growth: What impact will AI have on the rate of innovation and productivity growth across the economy? Sharing the gains: What pre- or re-distributive mechanisms could effectively spread the gains from AI development and deployment more broadly? Transaction costs in markets: How does AI affect systems of exchange and transaction costs in marketplaces? When does access to agents able to negotiate on your behalf improve market efficiency and equitable outcomes? When does it not?

Broad labor market impacts AI and jobs: How will AI change jobs and employment in different parts of the economy? What new tasks and jobs could emerge as AI automates existing parts of the economy? How will these changes vary across regions and countries? Our Anthropic Economic Index Survey will provide monthly signals of how people see AI affecting their work, and what they expect for the future. We’re also updating the Economic Index to share more high-frequency, granular data. Can AI diffusion be modulated? Central banks seek to moderate inflation through “dials” like the policy rate and…