Anthropic: 91% of Staff, 39% of US Adults Expect AI Nobel by 2030

Ninety-one percent of Anthropic staff expect AI to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030. Thirty-nine percent of US adults do. That is one of the headline findings in Anthropic's "AI Expectations Gap" paper, by economists Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, Charles I. Jones, Anton Korinek and Peter McCrory, which pairs a Morning Consult survey of 10,980 US adults with an internal poll of 1,334 Anthropic employees run in August 2026.

The gap runs through nearly every question. Staff estimate AI already performs 51% of frontier model-building work, climbing to 80% by end 2027 and 95% by 2030. On their own jobs, "staff members expect AI to be able to do 75% of their current work by 2030, compared to 28% for US workers overall." Only 5% of US workers expect AI to handle 80% or more of their job.

Productivity reports split in the same direction. "Among US adults who use AI at work, 26% say a task takes a quarter of the time or less with AI, compared to 59% of Anthropic staff." Twenty-nine percent of US AI users say tasks take the same time or longer.

Run through the paper's growth model, those priors imply very different macroeconomies. "The median US adult's answers imply GDP growth of 5.4% in 2030, according to the model. The median staff member's answers imply GDP growth accelerating to 17.1% by 2030." Workers who expect more of their own work automated also forecast higher unemployment, reaching 12.2% among those projecting 80%+ automation of their roles.

Anthropic has been dominant on our tracker, with 352 stories logged in the last 90 days, and this paper lands the same week the company floated a safety-bill proposal with $1B and 50-death thresholds. The expectations paper doubles as a hiring thesis: 95% of staff expect Anthropic headcount to grow within 12 months, with a median forecast of 66%.