• Anthropic published new surveys comparing its staffers' sentiments to those of US workers.
• The AI startup's employees expect the tech to change work and the economy far more dramatically.
• Most Anthropic employees guessed that unemployment would top 12% in 2030.

Anthropic employees believe that AI will make their labor obsolete. Most US workers don't see their jobs that way at all.

The AI company published research on Friday that compares surveys with US adults against an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees. Most of the Anthropic staffers said AI will handle at least 80% of their jobs by 2030, while only about 5% of the US workers felt the same.

The research, titled "The AI expectations gap," shows the chasm between how the employees at the AI startup feel and how other American adults feel. Anthropic workers are far more optimistic about the progress of AI capabilities, how much it's already saving time, and how fast the economy will grow.

The median Anthropic employee said that by the end of 2030, they expect AI to handle 95% of the work of building a new AI model.

Peter McCrory, Anthropic's chief economist, wrote on X that the views might help outsiders prepare for more capable AI systems.

"We're publishing this research because Anthropic runs roughly a year and a half ahead of the economy on AI adoption, so what happens at Anthropic could be a leading indicator for the broader world," he said.

Anthropic workers expect higher unemployment and extreme GDP growth

Anthropic's surveys examined how workers already use AI and how they think it will change.

"US adults and Anthropic staff largely agree about what AI can do today," the researchers wrote. "However, they disagree about how quickly it will improve, how widely it will be used, and how large the productivity gains measured by time saved will be."

There are a few possible explanations for the discrepancies. Anthropic employees have larger budgets for the tools and often get access to unreleased models. US workers, on average, are more likely to work with their hands or in a service industry.

The researchers found that workers in manual trades, production, and transport thought AI would handle the least of their work by 2030, compared with Anthropic staffers, tech workers, and respondents in business and finance.

Most Anthropic employees surveyed said that they expect the unemployment rate to top 12% in 2030. The majority of the US workers thought it would hover around or under 8%. It's currently 4.2%.

So far, researchers have found mixed evidence on AI disrupting the job market — a Yale team recently found it had mainly changed jobs, and had "no connection" to changes in unemployment.

The Anthropic researchers also compiled survey responses to estimate predictions on economic growth. Based on their answers, the median US adult's guess for GDP growth in 2030 was 5.4%, compared with 17.1% among Anthropic employees. The country's GDP grew by 2.2% last year.

Anthropic's staffers are following their leader

Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, has become one of the industry's most closely watched voices on labor upheaval. In March of 2025, he said he expected AI to write 90% of code within 6 months, and "essentially all of the code" within the year. He made more headlines that May, telling Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and lift unemployment to 10% or 20%.

Amodei expanded on that claim in a later essay, writing that he expects AI to be different from prior technological changes. He wrote that he expects an "unprecedented" short-term shock to labor, and that the economy will grow dramatically.

"AI isn't a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans," he wrote.

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The European Parliament has backed calls for an EU-wide strategy to tackle worsening shortages of healthcare professionals, including an ambition to increase the health workforce by one million, as doctors, nurses, pharmacists and dentists urged the European Commission to turn the recommendations into concrete action.

The own-initiative report, led by MEPs Loucas Fourlas (EPP, Cyprus) and Ruggero Razza (ECR, Italy), warns that shortages of doctors, nurses, carers and other professionals are becoming structural, driven by ageing populations, rising demand for care and persistent burnout...

Executive Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu presents Fair Labour Mobility package © European Union

The European Commission has unveiled what it calls an ambitious “Fair Labour Mobility” package aimed at making it easier for people to work across EU borders while strengthening protections against exploitation and fraud.

The proposals would allow workers to prove social security and health insurance entitlements digitally and make qualifications easier to understand and recognize. The Commission estimates the measures could generate €6 billion in benefits by 2040.

Central to the package is a European Social Security Pass, or ESSPASS, enabling people to request and receive documents such as the European Health Insurance Card and the A1 certificate for posted workers online. Documents could be stored in the EU Digital Identity Wallet and verified by national authorities.

Brussels is also proposing faster recognition of professional qualifications. Procedures for regulated professions, including doctors and nurses, with the aim of reducing the target processing time from three months to five weeks.

Recognition of qualifications obtained outside the EU would also be streamlined, with common standards intended to cut average processing times from 14 months to four months.

The European Federation of Nurses Associations (EFN) has welcomed the Commission’s plans for recognising qualifications from outside the EU, arguing that they bring greater transparency to a labour market already heavily reliant on internationally recruited healthcare professionals.

EFN Secretary General Paul De Raeve said recruitment from third countries was already well established and frequently organised through bilateral arrangements between governments. Denmark, he noted, has gone considerably further, establishing a school in Delhi to prepare Indian nurses for work in Denmark, including Danish-language training.

“This is going on,” De Raeve said, arguing that international mobility cannot simply be prevented when European health systems need staff and qualified professionals want to move. In the short term, he said, overseas recruitment is also difficult to avoid given that educating a nurse takes around four years.

For De Raeve, an important improvement in the Commission proposal is therefore not simply facilitating recruitment, but putting it within a clearer European framework. The proposed directive would establish common rules for recognising qualifications obtained outside the EU, including aligned documentation requirements.

It would also provide stronger mechanisms for checking whether qualifications are genuine and meet European standards. Training programmes and institutions seeking access to automatic recognition would undergo EU-level assessment, potentially including independent review, site visits and direct examination of training environments.

De Raeve particularly welcomed this approach, pointing to the risks of fraud in diploma accreditation. Having universities and training institutions formally assessed and certified would give regulators and employers greater confidence that somebody arriving with a qualification has been trained by a legitimate institution to an appropriate standard.

He also welcomed plans to reduce administrative delays for individual professionals.

For nursing, De Raeve argued, faster recognition and stronger verification could help Europe recruit internationally without lowering professional standards, while replacing opaque bilateral arrangements with more consistent EU-level rules.

The proposals still require approval by the European Parliament and EU governments. Key measures would then be phased in over several years, with improvements to the Labour Authority expected during 2028–2030.