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Anthropic, the maker of the AI chatbot Claude, says it has built an early warning system to track which U.S. jobs are most exposed to artificial intelligence — and its initial findings suggest many white-collar roles sit near the front lines.
The company’s new research comes as fears mount that AI is taking work away from young job-seekers. Older white-collar workers are fretting about their long-term job security in the face of ever-capable generative AI tools and recent layoffs from corporations such as Amazon and Block that have cited AI.
Anthropic’s researchers tracked the gap between AI’s capabilities and how the technology is actually being used by workers across professions. The analysis found “limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date.”
Early fears that AI is responsible for rising joblessness among young college grads may also be overblown, the researchers said, noting only “suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations.”
But despite the finding that AI has so far had little measurable impact on the labor market, the researchers said the technology could eventually have a seismic effect on many professions, from lawyers to sales reps.
Most exposed occupations
To determine a job’s exposure, Anthropic compared AI’s ability to perform specific tasks with how common those tasks are across professions.
Jobs are made up of many tasks, with some of them easily replaced by AI, while others are difficult to replace. Take teaching, where an AI chatbot could grade homework but wouldn’t be able to manage a classroom of children, the researchers noted.
Anthropic said a job’s “exposure” is based on the percentage of its tasks that artificial intelligence could potentially speed up or help perform.
These are the 10 professions Anthropic identified as most exposed to AI:
- Computer programmers: 75%
- Customer service reps: 70%
- Data entry keyers: 67%
- Medical record specialists: 67%
- Market research analysts and marketing specialists: 65%
- Sales reps: 63%
- Financial and investment analysts: 57%
- Software quality assurance analysts: 52%
- Information security analysts: 49%
- Computer user support specialists: 47%
Professions that are considered to be more “exposed” to artificial intelligence are projected to grow more slowly through 2034, Anthropic found, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Workers in these professions are more likely to be “older, female, more educated and higher-paid,” Anthropic researchers noted. That aligns with previous research that found women-dominated occupations are deeply vulnerable to AI, such as administrative assistants and clerks.
The least exposed occupations tend to require physical abilities. Jobs such as groundskeepers, cooks, motorcycle mechanics, lifeguards and bartenders ranked among those with the lowest exposure.
