AI's Real Threat to the Labor Market is Depressing Wage Growth, Study Finds
A new white paper by Apollo Global Management reveals that AI exposure correlates with slower wage growth rather than direct job losses. Since 2023, roles with high AI exposure experienced an average 6.7% decline in real wage growth, with computer programmers seeing a 6.1% drop. This shifts the conversation from AI causing mass unemployment to AI suppressing wages, particularly affecting low-income workers and tech professionals like software engineers. It highlights how AI integration can exacerbate income inequality as companies leverage automation to limit labor costs. The study utilized the Anthropic Economic Index to measure AI exposure across 321 occupations. While high-exposure technical roles like database architects and QA testers saw wage declines, low-income service workers experienced the sharpest drop in wage growth at 24.3% on average.
## BACKGROUND
The Anthropic Economic Index is a research framework developed by AI safety startup Anthropic to track how its AI model, Claude, is utilized across different occupations and industries. Economists use AI exposure indices to estimate the proportion of work tasks that can be augmented or automated by artificial intelligence, helping to predict labor market shifts.