Whitepaper Impact of AI on U.S. Labor Market 2026 R2 1

The Impact of AI on the U.S. Labor Market Early Evidence from Observed Adoption

Sania Edlich and Torsten Slok Apollo Global Management

Data 8 Methodology 9 Results 9

T H E I M PAC T O F A I O N T H E U. S . L A B O R M A R K E T 3

Abstract We examine the wage and employment effects of AI adoption across U.S. occupations using observed usage data from the Anthropic Economic Index rather than the theoretical exposure measures that dominate prior work. Using a difference-in-differences design with occupation and year fixed effects across 321 matched occupations from 2015 to 2025, we find that high-exposure occupations experience a 6.7% decline in real wage growth post-2023 with no detectable employment effects, suggesting firms are capturing AI productivity gains through wage compression rather than workforce reduction. The effect is concentrated among the lowest earners: service workers face a 24.3% decline and the bottom wage quartile a 10.7% decline, while top earners show no significant effect.

Today, 5.8 million workers are affected, but as AI adoption deepens across corporate America, this figure is likely to grow substantially, with significant implications for income inequality and labor market policy in the years ahead.