Research Economist, Economic Research

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 will work to measure and understand AI's effects on the global economy. You will make fundamental contributions to the development of the Anthropic Economic Index, establishing new methodologies to measure the usage, diffusion, and impact of AI throughout the economy using privacy-preserving tools and novel data sources. You will use frontier methods in econometrics, machine learning, and structural estimation. Such rigour will drive impact, shaping both policy discussions externally and informing Anthropic’s internal business and product decisions.

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.

Responsibilities

Make fundamental contributions to the development and expansion of the Anthropic Economic Index , including quarterly reports and industry-specific deep dives

Design and conduct empirical research on AI's economic effects, drawing on external data sources and the privacy-preserving measurement systems internally

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

Aggregate economic trajectories (GDP, productivity, unemployment) under varying AI-adoption scenarios

Develop causal-inference tooling — e.g. surrogate indexes, heterogeneous-effect pipelines — to help Anthropic evaluate the downstream economic consequences of its own compute, product, and pricing decisions

Build and maintain relationships with academic institutions, policy think tanks, and other research partners

Work cross-functionally with other technical teams to improve our measurement infrastructure and data collection

Translate research insights into actionable recommendations for both product decisions and policy discussions

Amplify external engagement through research publications, policy briefs, and presentations to diverse stakeholders

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

PhD in Economics

Strong track record of empirical research, particularly studies combining novel data sources and economic theory or those implementing frontier methods in causal inference and machine learning

Experience relevant to the study of AI’s impact on the economy, including:

Labor market analysis and occupational change

Task-based approaches to technological transformation

Large-scale data analysis and econometric methods

Large language models for social science research

Policy-relevant economic research

Experimental and quasi-experimental methods for causal inference

Macroeconomic modeling and time series forecasting

Agent-based modeling or large-scale simulation

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

Anthropic Economic Index Report: Economic Primitives

Anthropic Economic Index Report: Uneven Geographic and Enterprise AI Adoption

Estimating AI productivity gains from Claude conversations

The Anthropic Economic Index

Additional Information

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.

Application Question

Please provide a writing sample, preferably a job-market paper or other article that showcases your research and technical expertise.

Deadline to apply: None. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320,000 — $405,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:  A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

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