The Anthropic Economic Index connector

Anthropic has bolted a new connector onto Claude that turns its Economic Index — the running dataset on how AI shows up in real work — into something you can just talk to. Instead of downloading a CSV or parsing a research report, you open the connectors menu in claude.ai, flip on the Anthropic Economic Index, and start asking questions in plain English.

The questions on offer sound almost mundane, which is the point. Which occupations lean on AI most heavily. What people in Colorado are actually using Claude for. What tasks teachers hand off to the model. How the mix of automated tasks has shifted over the past year. These are the kind of questions a policymaker, a journalist, or just someone nervous about their own job might ask a well-informed colleague, and now Claude answers with numbers pulled straight from the Index rather than guesses.

Anthropic built the Index originally for researchers and policymakers trying to get an empirical handle on AI's effect on labor, rather than relying on anecdote or hype. The connector is the company's attempt to widen that audience past people who already read economic papers. Setup takes roughly a minute, works with any Claude model, and needs no installation — you can go from broad questions about your industry to specific follow-ups, and ask Claude to surface the raw data behind any claim it makes.

One caveat Anthropic is upfront about: this reflects patterns in how people use Claude specifically, not the entire labor market. Claude will apparently remind you of that limitation as you dig in, which is a small but useful bit of honesty baked into the product. The full datasets stay free on Anthropic's site for anyone who wants to skip the chat interface entirely and go straight to the numbers.