Supporting ambitious external research through the Anthropic Economic Futures Research Fund

On July 22, 2026, Anthropic announced the Economic Future Research Fund, committing $200 million to fund external research aimed at providing an empirical foundation for societal preparation for AI's economic impact. The fund is a major upgrade from Anthropic's Economic Futures project (launched a year earlier), whose experience showed that managing many small grants is hard to scale, prompting a shift to large, high-impact research investments.

The fund primarily supports projects between $5 million and $30 million, with flexibility for higher amounts for well-defined, high-potential projects, but a minimum grant of $1 million. Eligible recipients are limited to accredited universities, independent research institutions, policy research organizations, and non-profits with a track record of large-scale field experiments; individual applications are not accepted.

The fund specifies five priority areas but also welcomes innovative proposals outside these areas. First, shaping AI's impact on workers at the firm and workplace level, including field experiments that randomly assign AI systems and integration designs, evaluating the differences between worker participatory design and top-down approaches, and assessing the effects of retention tax credits and employer co-investment requirements.

Second, helping people navigate AI-driven transitions, evaluating skills retraining, job placement, licensing reforms, and sector transition programs, particularly AI-driven matching, certification, and learning models, as well as models that bundle income support with reemployment services. Third, modernizing income support systems, reforming traditional mechanisms like unemployment insurance for AI-driven job displacement.

Fourth, establishing worker benefit-sharing mechanisms for AI growth before disruption arrives, exploring models such as worker ownership or profit sharing. Fifth, generating new evidence for public investment, evaluating the effectiveness of government investments in AI transitions.

The fund particularly emphasizes large-scale randomized controlled trials and innovative pilots, as AI may change society faster than traditional research funding and publication cycles. Anthropic wants to partner with research organizations willing to publicly share learnings at key milestones, believing that 'a signal that arrives in time is more valuable than a perfect answer that arrives late.'

The fund also focuses on pilot projects that can scale quickly and is willing to fund innovative approaches 'no one has tried before.' For RCTs that only provide incremental evidence, the fund prefers bold pilots that can offer directional guidance.

The fund is positioned as global, but Anthropic acknowledges its research direction is somewhat US-centric, partly due to its headquarters in San Francisco and higher Claude usage in the US compared to other countries. However, the fund expects to support projects that reflect global needs, as preparation for AI disruption is necessary worldwide.