Anthropic launches Economic Advisory Council
Ten economists, including Tyler Cowen and three from the University of Chicago, will steer research for Anthropic's ongoing Economic Index on AI's labour-market effects.
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Anthropic announced an Economic Advisory Council of academic economists to advise the company on AI’s effects on labour markets, economic growth and broader socioeconomic systems. The initial members included Tyler Cowen (George Mason), three University of Chicago economists — Oeindrila Dube, John List and Tomas Philipson — John Horton (MIT Sloan), Anton Korinek (Virginia), Ioana Marinescu (Pennsylvania) and Silvana Tenreyro (LSE), with two more added shortly after.
Anthropic said the council would guide the research agenda for its Economic Index, an initiative launched earlier in 2025 that used aggregated, anonymised Claude usage data to track which occupations and tasks people applied the model to. The company framed the council as bringing outside academic scrutiny to that programme rather than running it as purely internal product research.
The move followed a wider 2025 pattern of frontier labs institutionalising economic and labour-market analysis of their own products, alongside comparable work from OpenAI. It carried no regulatory weight, but signalled Anthropic wanted its labour-market claims to carry named academic credibility rather than internal analysis alone.