AI may already be adding hundreds of billions to the economy—without showing up in the data

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The AI economy has a measurement gap…Anthropic files IPO paperwork…Meta bets on subscriptions and enterprise to monetize AI…and AI-generated fake citations are infiltrating scientific literature. When it comes to measuring the economic impact of AI, no one can agree on where to start. Listen to the narrative coming from the Big Tech firms, and AI is already supposed to be transforming everything from how we work to how companies are organized and even how entire industries, such as software engineering, function. But if you look at the official economic statistics, like productivity numbers or GDP growth rate, you’d be hard-pressed to find the numbers to back this up. Some argue the technology is transforming the economy in a way our statistics simply cannot keep up with. Others say that, for all its hype, AI has yet to show up in firm-level productivity in any systematic way. That gap between the hype and the numbers is what a new policy brief from the Peterson Institute for International Economics is trying to explain. Measuring AI’s economic impact The brief, written by Anton Korinek, a nonresident senior fellow at Peterson and head of Transformative AI Economic Studies at the Anthropic Institute, and Patrick McKelvey, a senior data scientist at the Bank of Canada, argues that AI is already growing at extraordinary speed, but that official statistics are simply not built to track it. The brief points to two problems. First, AI activity is scattered across dozens of different industries in the official accounts—cloud services, software, data processing—so there’s no single place where you can see the AI economy as a whole. Second, the stats have no good way to account for how fast AI is improving. They estimate that AI generated roughly $250 billion in economic activity in 2025, comparable in size to the entire U.S. airline industry, and that the amount of AI output the industry can produce is growi