Anthropic announced the Anthropic Economic Futures Research Fund, committing $200 million to support external research on interventions to prepare society for the economic impacts of AI. The fund aims to study programs that could make the economy more flexible and resilient, ensure the benefits of AI are shared, and minimize harm from AI-driven disruption. It prioritizes five research areas: shaping AI’s impact on workers at the firm and workplace level, equipping people to navigate AI-driven transitions, modernizing income support for AI-driven displacement, building worker stakes in AI-driven growth before disruption arrives, and generating new evidence on public investments.

Anthropic published an Economic Policy Framework in June that proposed programs for various scenarios, but the fund seeks empirical evidence on which interventions actually work in an AI-transformed economy. The fund represents a significant evolution of the Economic Futures program launched a year ago, updating focus to ambitious projects and large grants (typically $5-30 million, with nothing below $1 million) because scaling capacity for many small grants proved difficult. Anthropic aims to fund large-scale RCTs, creative pilots, and program evaluations that expand shared understanding and inspire new solutions. They emphasize early public sharing of findings since AI could transform society faster than traditional funding and publication cycles.

The fund is global though initial directions are somewhat US-centric due to Anthropic‘s location and Claude usage patterns. Proposals are accepted from accredited universities, independent research institutes, policy research organizations, and nonprofits with a track record of running field experiments at scale. Individual researchers can serve as PIs through their institutions but cannot apply personally. The five research directions include field experiments on AI workplace integration designs, evaluations of retention tax credits, innovative retraining and job placement models, unemployment insurance reforms for persistent displacement, longer-duration unconditional income pilots, pre-distributive capital account tests, equity-sharing or dividend-style mechanisms, public investment pilots in human- and community-facing work, and guaranteed-jobs pilots for displaced workers. Anthropic welcomes ambitious proposals outside these priorities as long as they are calibrated to the scale of the problem.