Economist
About Anthropic
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.
About the role
As an Economist at Anthropic, you'll lead our work to measure and understand AI's effects on the global economy. You'll drive the development of the AI Economic Index, establishing new methodologies for measuring AI's real-world economic impact using privacy-preserving tools and empirical data. Your work will help shape both policy discussions and product decisions as AI transforms the economy.
Our team combines rigorous empirical methods with novel measurement approaches. We're building first-of-its-kind datasets tracking AI's impact on labor markets, productivity, and economic transformation. Using our privacy-preserving measurement system (Clio), we analyze millions of real-world AI interactions to understand how AI augments and automates work across different occupations and tasks.
For this role, we're looking for candidates who can combine rigorous economic analysis with novel measurement approaches to understand AI's transformative effects on the economy. The ideal candidate will be comfortable working at the intersection of empirical economics, technological change, and policy impact.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the development and expansion of the AI Economic Index, including quarterly reports and industry-specific deep dives
- Design and conduct empirical research on AI's economic effects using novel data sources and privacy-preserving measurement systems
- Develop new methodological approaches for studying AI's impact on:
- Labor markets and the future of work
- Productivity and task transformation
- Economic inequality and displacement
- Industry-specific disruption and adaptation
- Build and maintain relationships with academic institutions, policy think tanks, and other research partners
- Work cross-functionally with technical teams to improve our measurement infrastructure and data collection
- Translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product decisions and policy discussions
- Lead external engagement through research publications, policy briefs, and presentations to diverse stakeholders
You may be a good fit if you have:
- PhD in Economics or related field with focus on labor economics, industrial organization, or technological change
- Strong track record of empirical research, particularly studies combining novel data sources with economic theory
- Experience with:
- Labor market analysis and occupational change
- Task-based approaches to technological transformation
- Large-scale data analysis and econometric methods
- Policy-relevant economic research
- Technical skills including:
- Proficiency in Python, R, SQL, or similar tools for large-scale data analysis
- Experience working with novel datasets and measurement systems
- Comfort learning new technical tools and frameworks
- Demonstrated ability to:
- Lead complex research projects from conception to publication
- Communicate technical findings to diverse audiences
- Build relationships across academic, policy, and industry communities
- Strong interest in ensuring AI development benefits humanity
- Comfort working with AI systems and ability to think critically about their capabilities and limitations
Some examples of our recent work:
- The Anthropic Economic Index: Measuring AI's Impact Through Real-World Usage Data
- Economic Tasks Performed with AI: Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations
- Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use
The expected salary range for this position is:
Logistics
Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
Come work with us!
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.