Anthropic partners with the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute on AI economic research (www.anthropic.com)

Anthropic has announced a strategic partnership with the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) to advance research on AI’s impact on labor markets and the broader economy. This collaboration grants BFI economists access to Anthropic’s Claude for Enterprise AI tools, along with training and workshops designed to integrate AI into economic research. Building on Anthropic’s Economic Index initiative, the partnership aims to deepen the empirical study of how AI influences productivity, labor market dynamics, and distributional effects across different sectors and societal groups. This alliance is significant for the AI/ML community because it blends cutting-edge AI capabilities with world-class economic expertise, enabling a more nuanced analysis of AI-driven economic shifts. Key research areas include measuring AI’s effect on productivity metrics, understanding occupational task transformations, and assessing which social groups benefit or face challenges due to AI adoption. By fostering robust empirical approaches, the partnership promises to refine policy-relevant insights, addressing the complexity and uneven distribution of AI integration rather than relying on simplistic automation narratives. Technically, the collaboration leverages Claude for Enterprise’s data-processing power to complement BFI’s theoretical and empirical methods, allowing economists to engage directly with AI-generated data. The initiative highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding AI’s multifaceted economic consequences and aims to provide policymakers and researchers with rigorous evidence to guide workforce development, economic policy, and AI governance frameworks.