What work can robots do?
We present a robot exposure index based on how well robots can perform job tasks today.

Key points
- Robots, which we define as autonomous physical machines that sense and act, can perform three-quarters of physical tasks in the US, making up 34% of working hours, but mostly in limited settings.
- Overall, about 80% of job tasks by working time are exposed to either robots or LLMs. Robots do work where LLMs cannot.
- While robots can do most physical work tasks today, they are much more expensive than human labor.
- We develop a measure of job exposure to robots, using Claude to assess how well present-day robots can perform work tasks.
Sources (1)
- [1]What work can robots do?Anthropic Research · Sep 30, 12:00 AM
- We present a robot exposure index based on how well robots can perform job tasks today.
- Robots, which we define as autonomous physical machines that sense and act, can perform three-quarters of physical tasks in the US, making up 34% of working hours, but mostly in limited settings.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
Before this
- Sep 29, 2026[AINews] AMD buys World Labs for $8.2B, as Atlas solves sparse reconstruction problem for robotics, design and more
- Sep 29, 2026Claude Code’s Next Era — Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic
- Sep 29, 2026GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities
- Sep 29, 2026What do you want from AI?
- Sep 4, 2026anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python v1.4.0
- Aug 21, 2026ollama/ollama v0.33.0