Anthropic Institute Agenda

The Anthropic Institute is Anthropic's research group for studying what AI does to the economy, security and society, using what the company can see from inside a frontier lab, and this agenda is its list of the questions it intends to work on. Published May 7, 2026 and described as a living document, the agenda groups those questions into four areas: how AI spreads through the economy, new threats and how society can become resilient to them, how people and institutions change when they use AI systems, and AI speeding up research, including research on AI itself. It contains questions and plans rather than findings.

The concrete commitments are about what Anthropic will publish. It says it will release more granular data from its Anthropic Economic Index, which tracks how people use Claude, at a higher cadence, with the aim of serving as an early warning of significant labor disruption, and that a new Economic Index Survey will give monthly signals of how people see AI affecting their work. It also promises research on which parts of society most need investment to withstand AI-enabled security risks, and more detail on how much AI tools have sped up Anthropic's own work, along with its ideas about what recursive self-improvement, AI systems improving their own successors, could mean.

The questions show where Anthropic expects pressure. On jobs, the agenda asks what happens to expertise if AI absorbs the junior work, such as paralegal or associate-developer tasks, through which people have traditionally become senior practitioners. On AI-driven research, it asks how to measure the overall speed of AI development, which metrics could warn of recursive self-improvement, and how to run a fire drill for an intelligence explosion that tests decisions by lab leadership, boards and governments. Anthropic says the institute's work will shape its own decisions and feed its Long-Term Benefit Trust, the body meant to keep the company acting for humanity's long-term benefit. Earlier Intel coverage of the first Economic Index explains what that dataset measured and what it did not.