A research agenda for the Economic Futures Research Fund
| Source: Anthropic News (community RSS)
Tags: Anthropic, economic policy, AI workforce, research funding, future of work, RCT
Anthropic is committing $200 million to fund external research on interventions that prepare society for AI-driven economic disruption, focusing on worker transitions, income support, and building evidence for policies that don't yet exist.
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Anthropic has published the research agenda for its Economic Futures Research Fund, committing $200 million to support external researchers studying how to prepare for AI's economic impacts. The fund prioritizes five areas: shaping AI's impact on workers at the firm level, equipping people for AI-driven transitions, modernizing income support, building worker stakes in AI-driven growth, and generating new evidence on public investments. The fund is a significant evolution of Anthropic's existing Economic Futures program and explicitly favors large-scale randomized control trials, ambitious pilots, and program evaluations over incremental research. Anthropic states it will fund creative proposals even if 'no one has tried them yet,' signaling openness to novel policy experiments. The $200M commitment dwarfs most private sector economic research initiatives. The focus on empirical evidence for interventions — rather than theoretical frameworks — is a pragmatic stance acknowledging that AI's economic effects are uncertain enough that existing policy models may not apply.