Tech mogul Elon Musk believes that once humanoid robots achieve mass production, Anthropic's most aggressive artificial intelligence growth scenario could become a tangible reality. He argues that the economic shift driven by combining AI with physical automation will extend far beyond the knowledge economy.

On Wednesday, responding to a post on the prediction market Polymarket that outlined Anthropic's economic forecasting tool, Musk commented: "This will certainly become a reality once humanoid robots are mass-produced." The post highlighted Anthropic's extreme projection model, which envisions US annual GDP growth of around 15% and an economy doubling in size every 4.5 years.

Anthropic stresses this is a conditional hypothesis, not a forecast. Their model assumes AI surpasses human productivity on the vast majority of knowledge-based tasks, operates almost completely autonomously, and creates few new knowledge-sector jobs for people. They note that achieving this path may require AI with recursive self-improvement capabilities and rapid technology deployment.

Under these assumptions, Anthropic estimates US GDP could reach $44.4 trillion by 2030, a 32.4% increase over a no-AI baseline. However, labour's share of output would fall from roughly 60% to 45.2%, while capital's share would climb to 54.8%. Knowledge worker salaries would decline, and unemployment would surpass levels seen in typical recessions.

Anthropic acknowledges a major limitation in the model: it does not incorporate scenarios involving "hyper-capable robots." This gap gives Musk's comments particular weight, given that Tesla Motors is attempting to expand AI into physical operations through its Optimus robot.

In a separate, broader prediction on the same day, Musk posted: "AI + humanoid robotics will more than double the size of the global economy in under 10 years."