What work can robots do? Anthropic's study, explained

Today's robots can do some version of 74% of physical job tasks in the US, which adds up to 34% of all working hours. They are cheaper than a person for only 0.3% of tasks. Those are the headline numbers from "What work can robots do?", an Anthropic economics report published September 30 by Russell Legate-Yang and Maxim Massenkoff.

Legate-Yang summed it up in a post on X: robots "extend AI exposure far beyond digital work," and when you combine robots with language models, over 80% of US working hours are exposed to one or the other. The next line is the one that got passed around. Robots are cost-competitive for "just 0.3%," and if prices keep falling at the historical pace, it takes about 40 years to reach 10%.

If you run a crew, a kitchen or a shop floor, the gap between what a robot can do and what it costs is the part to pay attention to.

How Anthropic measured it

The team started with O*NET, the Department of Labor database of roughly 900 occupations and 19,000 job tasks. They had Claude search for real robots relevant to each physical task, judge what those robots could do and cite sources. A capability only counted if someone had shown a robot doing it.

Each task was then scored by how controlled the environment has to be for a robot to handle it:

• E0: robots can't do it at all
• E1: only in a purpose-built setting, like a factory cell
• E2: in a structured human space, like a warehouse
• E3: out in the messy world, like a city street

So a job counts as more exposed when robots can handle more of its tasks in less controlled places. Taxi drivers came out on top, because driving is most of the job and robotaxis already work on public roads. Nursing and general repair landed near the bottom, since robots can do little of that work even in a tightly controlled room.

Why cost is the real limit

The 74% figure sounds alarming until you look at the price tags. A few examples from the report:

Packers and packagers come closest. A robot runs about $45,000 a year against roughly $49,000 in worker pay. Robotaxis cost about $7,000 a year more than a driver and still face regulatory hurdles. For welders, dishwashers and janitors, the robot costs three to five times what the person does.

The report also lists the barriers beyond cost. Missing dexterity limits about half of physical tasks. Regulations block 14%, mostly in healthcare, protective services and education. Customer preference rules out a quarter, in areas like childcare and hospitality where people want a human.

My read

The 74% will get the attention, but I think the cost number is the one owners should remember. A robot that can technically wash dishes but costs three to five times as much as your dishwasher is not a threat to your dishwasher this decade.

The authors do hedge, and fairly. Looking back to 1977, jobs exposed to the robots of their day saw wages and employment fall in later decades, and the report warns that AI-powered robots could jump ahead of the historical trend. Robots have also been picking up about 2% of previously impossible physical tasks each year. Forty years is a straight-line estimate, and real adoption rarely moves in a straight line.

Yahoo Finance, writing up the report, puts language-model exposure at roughly half of all work tasks, and that half is mostly office work: scheduling, quoting, follow-up, invoicing, answering the same questions over and over. You don't need a $45,000 machine for any of it.

What this means for a trade or service business

For a plumbing shop in St. Charles or a restaurant in Geneva, the field techs and the dishwasher aren't getting replaced by robots any time soon, going by Anthropic's own math. The office work behind them is where AI pays off this year. Missed calls, slow quotes, appointment reminders and the Monday numbers all fall on the language-model side of that 80%.

Physical robots are moving too, as Claude's lab-robot work and Gemini Robotics 2's success rates show. For most owners, though, the cheap wins are in the office.

If you want to know which of your office tasks belong in that half, New Face Design's free process audit maps them out, task by task.