On May 19, 2025, Alex Tamkin, research scientist at Anthropic, stopped by the lab for his talk, “Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations.”
Despite widespread speculation about artificial intelligence’s impact on the future of work, we lack systematic empirical evidence about how these systems are actually being used for different tasks. Here, we present a novel framework for measuring AI usage patterns across the economy. We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system [Tamkin et al., 2024] to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with ∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks.
We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement). While our data and methods face important limitations and only paint a picture of AI usage on a single platform, they provide an automated, granular approach for tracking AI’s evolving role in the economy and identifying leading indicators of future impact as these technologies continue to advance.
Alex Tamkin is a researcher at Anthropic interested in how we can understand and improve the societal impacts of AI systems. Some recent work in this vein:
Previously, Alex completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, where he was advised by Noah Goodman and part of the Stanford AI Lab and Stanford NLP Group.
