Anthropic’s Head of Economics on AI adoption data, Claude Code, the burden of knowledge & the next generation of experts

Anthropic's Head of Economics, Peter McCrory, discusses the latest Economic Index report, which analyzes AI's augmentation of human work through Claude.ai and API interactions. The report highlights two distinct usage patterns: automation via API, which has lower success rates, and augmentation through Claude.ai, which yields higher success. McCrory emphasizes that the labor market's transformation hinges on how businesses embed AI, drawing parallels to electricity's invisible integration. The conversation explores the potential for AI to automate tasks like data entry, potentially changing job roles and creating institutional fragility by automating apprenticeship work. They also consider whether AI can automate innovation itself, overcoming the burden of knowledge, while acknowledging the challenges of diffusion and the need for human expertise in evaluating AI outputs.