By: Eduardo Porter<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tOriginally published on\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>, July 15, 2026.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence may not deliver on its promise of vast economic opportunity at a price that humanity is willing to pay<\/p>\n In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis<\/a> on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor.<\/p>\n Last year in May, Anthropic\u2019s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs in one to five years. Last January, he told us<\/a> AI would probably become a \u201cgeneral labor substitute for humans\u201d. In June he said<\/a> we risk \u201ca world where the economic trade-off dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting\u201d.<\/p>\n And yet, Anthropic\u2019s report suggests that, so far, AI\u2019s impact has fallen short of expectations: \u201cWe find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022,\u201d the report stated. Deployment of the technology \u201cremains a fraction of what\u2019s feasible\u201d. Claude covers just 33% of all tasks in the computer and math category whereas theoretically it could take over nearly 100% of them.<\/p>\n Spending on datacenters is going through the roof, for sure, but productivity<\/a>has not been experiencing the galloping gains that the technorati\u2019s epochal prognostications lead one to expect. Labor productivity was, in fact, slower in the first three years of our AI era than during the information technology boom that began in the mid 1990s.<\/p>\n Even OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, AI\u2019s most public face, says he now doubts its job-killing potential. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to have the kind \u200bof jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,\u201d he said in May<\/a>. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor noted: \u201cA lot of people have noticed that the world is not changing as fast as they predicted.\u201d<\/p>\n