Anthropic puts forward an idea that would seriously affect its profitability
The leading AI company has published a handful of policy proposals on how governments should respond to mainstream AI adoption.
Anthropic logo. By Getty Images
The leading AI company has published a handful of policy proposals on how governments should respond to mainstream AI adoption. Some of the proposals do not reflect Anthropic's own policy positions. On the contrary, Anthropic would stand to lose if they were ever implemented.
“As AI models continue to work independently for longer periods of time, and as more employers adopt AI to improve their productivity, we expect this trend to accelerate. The implications for the workforce are uncertain,” Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, said.
The company said that users are becoming increasingly dependent on Claude, delegating full tasks to it.
Anthropic has engaged with nonpartisan thinkers and people from across the political spectrum to determine how policymakers should respond to and mitigate AI’s implications for the workforce.
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Experts explored nine clusters of ideas, which they divided into three potential scenarios. Some policy ideas are suitable for nearly every scenario: from slow AI innovation to doomsday outcomes such as dramatic job losses and rising inequality.
Here’s what could be done depending on the scenario:
- Invest in upskilling through workforce training grants
- Reform tax incentives for worker retention and retraining
- Close corporate tax loopholes
- Accelerate permits and approvals for AI infrastructure
- Establish trade adjustment assistance for AI displacement
- Implement taxes on compute or token generation
- Create national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in AI
- Adopt or modernize value-added taxes
- Implement new revenue structures to account for AI’s growing share of the economy
The final three suggestions are extreme and would be necessary only in a worst‑case scenario – people losing their jobs en masse due to automation and rising inequality.
For moderate scenarios that seem the most likely, suggestions entail supporting people affected by AI. In fact, policy makers should start working on this one as a new report from the British Standards Institution (BSI) suggests artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to cut entry-level jobs.
Another policy suggestion for a moderate scenario is to propose a range of taxes on token generation robots and various digital services.
“Although these taxes on computational resources distort investment along an AI-transformed economy’s trajectory, they could become the only remaining mechanism to capture some of the windfall generated by AI if the role of both labor markets and human consumption in the economy declines,” Anthropic said, explaining the idea put together by University of Virginia economists Lee Lockwood and Anton Korinek.
Anthropic noted that such an idea would directly impact the company’s revenue and profitability. However, it deserves serious study.
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