Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, researchers at Anthropic, built a new metric called “observed exposure” that combines what AI can theoretically do with what Claude is actually being used for in professional settings. Their opening frame:

The rapid diffusion of AI is generating a wave of research measuring and forecasting its impacts on labor markets. But the track record of past approaches gives reason for humility. For example, a prominent attempt to measure job offshorability identified roughly a quarter of US jobs as vulnerable, but a decade on, most of those jobs maintained healthy employment growth.

With that caveat, the headline: no detectable rise in unemployment among the most exposed workers since ChatGPT launched. Even in Computer & Math—AI’s home turf—actual task coverage sits at just 33%. The gap between what AI could automate and what it is automating remains enormous.

But buried in the data:

The averaged estimate in the post-ChatGPT era is a 14% drop in the job finding rate compared to that in 2022 in the exposed occupations, although this is just barely statistically significant. (There is no such decrease for workers older than 25.)

Not unemployment. Hiring. Young workers, ages 22 to 25, are the ones not getting hired into AI-exposed roles. The authors attribute this to slowed hiring rather than increased separations. Companies aren’t firing juniors. They’re not posting the listings. The cause is anticipatory, not capability-based. The pipeline is breaking before the technology arrives.

Sam Manning and Tomás Aguirre, in a separate NBER paper, ask the follow-up question: of the workers most exposed, who can actually land on their feet? They looked at savings, skill transferability, where people live, and age. Most workers in highly exposed jobs turn out to be relatively well-positioned. They’re professionals with portable skills who live in cities with other options. But about 6 million workers are both highly exposed and poorly equipped to transition. They’re mostly in clerical and admin roles. Exposure alone doesn’t tell you much. Exposure plus the ability to pivot does. Worth noting: “Web and digital interface designers” topped their list of most-exposed occupations with high adaptive capacity. Exposed, yes. But we are well-positioned to move.