The AI skills gap is here, says AI company, and power users are pulling ahead

Anthropic’s latest research suggests that while AI is rapidly changing the way work gets done, it hasn’t meaningfully eliminated jobs. At least, not yet. But beneath what Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, says is a “still healthy” labor market, early signs are pointing to uneven impacts, especially for younger workers just entering the workforce. 

In an interview on the sidelines of the Axios AI Summit in Washington, D.C., McCrory said the company’s newest economic impact report finds little evidence of widespread job displacement so far. 

“There’s no material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for the “most central task of their job in automated ways” — like technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers — and workers in jobs less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.” 

But with AI adoption spreading across industries, that could shift — fast. If Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is to be believed, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within the next five years.

“Displacement effects could materialize very quickly, so you want to establish a monitoring framework to understand that before it materializes so that we can catch it as it’s happening and ideally identify the appropriate policy response,” McCrory told TechCrunch.

Staying ahead of those trends is why tracking AI growth, adoption, and diffusion is so important, he said.

In theory, McCrory said, AI models like Claude can do almost anything a computer can do. In practice, most users are only scratching the surface of those capabilities.

He said Anthropic looked at which roles involve tasks that AI is particularly good at, that are already being automated, and that are tied to real workplace use cases — the areas most likely to signal where displacement could emerge. 

Anthropic’s fifth economic impact report, released Tuesday, also found that even where there hasn’t been much displacement yet, there’s a growing skills gap between earlier Claude adopters and newcomers.

Earlier adopters are more likely to get significantly more value from the model, using it for work-related tasks rather than casual or one-off purposes and in more sophisticated ways, like as a “thought partner” for iteration and feedback. 

McCrory said the findings suggest AI is becoming a technology that rewards those who already know how to use it — and that workers who can effectively incorporate it into their work will increasingly have an edge.

That advantage isn’t evenly distributed geographically, either. The report also found that “Claude is used more intensely in high-income countries, within the U.S. in places with more knowledge workers, and for a relatively small set of specialized tasks and occupations.”

In other words, despite promises of AI as an equalizer, adoption may already be tilting toward the wealthy and could amplify those advantages as power users pull further ahead.