Transformative AI Research Economist, Economic Research
San Francisco, CA
Posted 16d ago
About the job
As a Transformative AI Research Economist at Anthropic, you will build macroeconomic models of AI that could be genuinely transformative and develop scenario-based forecasting tools to quantitatively reason about economic trajectories with no historical precedent. You will work on questions of aggregate growth, income distribution, and economic governance under scenarios that most of the profession has not yet modeled seriously. You will ground projections in microeconomic signals from the Anthropic Economic Index, using usage patterns across millions of real-world AI interactions surfaced through privacy-preserving measurement, so that scenario forecasts are disciplined by observed task transformation and productivity. You will use frontier methods in growth theory, computational macro, and structural estimation, and contribute to AI-powered tools that expand what economic research can do.
Responsibilities
- Build macroeconomic models of transformative AI spanning growth, labor markets, and income distribution.
- Develop and maintain scenario-based forecasting tools and publish forecasts for GDP, productivity, and unemployment under various AI-capability trajectories.
- Ground macroeconomic projections in microeconomic data from the Anthropic Economic Index, constraining theory with observed patterns of adoption and task transformation.
- Analyze questions of income distribution and economic governance under transformative-AI scenarios.
- Contribute to the development of AI-powered research tools for economics.
- Contribute to Economic Index Reports and publish Research Briefs on emerging first-order questions.
- Build and maintain relationships with academic institutions, policy think tanks, and other research partners.
- Amplify external engagement through research publications, policy briefs, and presentations to diverse stakeholders.
Requirements
- PhD in Economics, or an exceptional candidate close to completion.
- Background in macroeconomics, growth theory, or public finance, ideally with exposure to task-based frameworks and labor economics.
- A research record that seriously engages with the possibility of transformative AI.
- Experience in macroeconomic modeling and structural estimation.
- Experience in scenario-based and time-series forecasting.
- Experience with task-based approaches to technological change.
- Experience with computational methods, agent-based modeling, or large-scale simulation.
- Experience with income distribution and inequality.
- Experience using large language models in the research workflow.
- Proficiency in Python, Julia, or similar for computational economics.
- Facility with AI coding agents as part of a research workflow.
- Comfort learning new technical tools and frameworks.
- Demonstrated ability to lead research projects from conception to publication.
- Demonstrated ability to ship on tight timelines and revise in public as new data arrives.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate technical findings to diverse audiences.
- Strong interest in ensuring AI development benefits humanity.