Is Your Career At Risk From AI? Anthropic Study Shows White-Collar Jobs May Be More Exposed Than Manual Work

A new study by the AI company Anthropic has offered some relief to people worried about artificial intelligence taking over their jobs. The report says that many hands-on jobs that require physical work are still relatively safe from automation, at least for now.

The study looked at how AI tools, including the company’s own model Claude, are being used in real workplaces and how capable they could become in the future. Researchers analysed tasks across different professions to understand which jobs AI can already perform and which ones are still difficult for machines to handle. The report is titled “Labour Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence.”

Manual Jobs Least Affected Says Anthropic AI

According to the findings, jobs that involve physical presence or manual work are the least exposed to artificial intelligence. These include professions such as cooks, mechanics, bartenders and dishwashers. Researchers estimate that about 30 percent of workers have almost no exposure to AI because their work mainly involves physical tasks that current AI systems cannot perform.

Reports say that the reason is simple: large language models like chatbots are good at working with text, data and digital tasks, but they cannot physically repair machines, prepare food, or handle tools in the real world. So this limitation means that many service and manual jobs remain difficult to automate with current technology.

White-Collar Jobs More Exposed

At the same time, the study suggests that several white-collar professions could face higher exposure to AI in the future. Fields such as business, finance, management, computer science and legal services could see a large share of their work handled by AI systems.

For example, the researchers said AI could theoretically perform up to 94 percent of the tasks done by people working in computer and mathematics professions. However, in real workplaces the actual use of AI in these jobs is still much lower. Based on interactions with Anthropic’s systems, AI currently performs around 33 percent of those tasks.

The researchers explained that this gap exists for several reasons. There are several legal rules and technical limits, plus the need for human supervision still restrict how much work companies allow AI to do.

Also Read: Oracle Plans Thousands Of Job Cuts Amid Soaring AI Data Center Costs: Is Tech Boom Triggering A Workforce Shake-Up?