Anthropic's $44 Trillion GDP Figure Is Its Extreme Scenario

Jeff's Daily Pick. Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark told the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok that one of the company's models puts US GDP at $44 trillion in 2030 (Reuters). It is the extreme case of three published scenarios, in 2025 prices. BEA: 2025 GDP was $30.86 trillion.

In the United States, the figure is now a headline: Anthropic sees a $44 trillion economy in 2030. Jack Clark, Anthropic cofounder and head of public benefit, used it on Saturday, October 17, 2026, in a lecture at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, Reuters reported. Reuters described it as a forecast from one of the company's internal models. Clark said the number "sounds very outlandish, I know."

Where the number comes from

The model is not secret. Anthropic published it in September as an online scenario explorer, version 1.0, with a working paper by Anton Korinek, Charles Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter and Peter McCrory. It runs three scenarios to 2030. Modest: US GDP of $34.1 trillion, 1.6% above a path without AI. Substantial: $36.3 trillion, 8.3% above. Extreme: $44.4 trillion, 32.4% above, with AI better than people at most knowledge work tasks and doing nearly all of them on its own. All three are in 2025 prices. The paper states that the scenarios are not predictions and carry no probabilities.

Redoing the math

Reuters compared $44 trillion with a current level of just over $30 trillion and described a rise of almost 50%. The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts 2025 GDP at $30.86 trillion in current dollars, and the second quarter of 2026 at an annual rate of $32.56 trillion. Against 2025, both in 2025 dollars, $44.4 trillion is 44% more. Part of that rise happens without AI: dividing $44.4 trillion by 1.324 gives a no AI path of about $33.5 trillion in 2030. The AI effect in the extreme case is the gap above that path, about $10.9 trillion.

What the extreme case requires is the other half of the story. Growth reaches 15.4% a year in 2030, against 2.0% without AI and 2.2% for real GDP in the second quarter of 2026. Labor's share of income falls from 60% to 45.2%, and nearly one in five knowledge workers is unemployed. In a survey of 10,980 Americans, the typical answers matched the substantial scenario, with GDP about 10% higher; around 10% of respondents held views in line with the extreme one.

Clark also said the window for rules on AI is now "a small number of years" and named biological research as the area that needs the strictest oversight. The remarks come as Anthropic prepares a stock market listing that Reuters says could come in November. Our piece on Anthropic's revenue and IPO valuation has the company's own numbers.