Anthropic Survey: 91% of Staff Expect Nobel-Level AI Discoveries by 2030 vs 39% of US Adults
Anthropic Research · rss · 2026-10-16
Anthropic's economics team published "The AI Expectations Gap" (authors include Charles I. Jones and Anton Korinek), surveying a nationally representative sample of US adults (N=10,980) and Anthropic staff in August 2026.
- Capabilities: 91% of staff expect AI to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030 vs 39% of US adults; 19–40% of adults think AI will never do certain tasks vs at most 2% of staff.
- Own jobs: Staff on average expect AI to do 75% of their current work by 2030 vs 28% for US workers; over half of staff expect ≥80% vs 5% of the public.
- Productivity: 26% of US adults using AI at work say tasks take a quarter of the time or less, vs 59% of staff.
- Adoption obstacles: Adults expect preferences and rules, not technology, to hold adoption back — top answer was "customers preferring to deal with a person," followed by data privacy, reliability, and regulation/liability.
- Autonomy: Most staff expect AI to complete tasks alone or with human review by 2030; 4 in 10 adults expect humans to still do most of the work.
- Labor market: Both groups reason similarly — those expecting AI to do more of their own work forecast higher unemployment.
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