The Anthropic Institute's Key Research Focus Areas

The Anthropic Institute (TAI) studies the impact of AI on the economy, security, and society based on the vantage point it has within a frontier AI research organization, and publishes its findings. The research agenda consists of four pillars: Economic Diffusion, Threats and Resilience, AI systems in the wild, and AI-driven R&D.

• Economic Diffusion: The team will further refine The Anthropic Economic Index and use monthly surveys along with high-frequency, granular data to track who adopts AI, how it diffuses within firms, productivity, growth, labor markets, transaction costs, and shifts in occupational structure. The goal is to create signals that catch major shifts and disruptions early.

• Threats and Resilience: This pillar examines how dual-use AI heightens risks in the biological, cyber, and surveillance domains, and reviews crisis-response infrastructure, the offense-defense balance, and defensive mechanisms such as automated patching and detection. This work overlaps with the research agenda of the Frontier Red Team.

• AI systems in the wild: As real users and organizations use AI, this pillar measures collective cognition, critical thinking, human-AI collaboration, and how a model's values and behavior change after deployment.

• AI-driven R&D: This pillar looks at how much AI tools have accelerated Anthropic's internal research pace, and what recursive self-improvement means in practice.

TAI said it will release research data and tools more frequently to help external researchers, governments, and the public make better AI policy decisions. This work also serves as an important input into the decision-making of the Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), and anyone interested can apply for the 4-month paid Anthropic Fellow program, which offers mentoring from the TAI team. This agenda is not a fixed plan but a living research plan that will continue to be revised as evidence accumulates.