Thank Fathom it’s Friday

AI: we saw this coming

Andrew Harris25 September 2026|

Anthropic has released a series of economic scenarios which lay out what alternative pathways for AI development might mean for the wider economy. They’re a good read, and have been widely covered in the press. Anthropic might be a multi-billion dollar company, but it certainly isn’t the first to produce such scenarios — let me tell you that Fathom was doing that four years ago! Despite the huge changes that have happened since our report, it’s interesting to see how right we called it. In early 2022 (before Chat GPT was launched and before AI became ‘cool’), we began work on our first in-depth study of AI, commissioned by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). Titled Welcome to the Machine, the project was a detailed study of the US and China’s relative prowess in this emerging technology, and how their respective approaches to it would shape the future of techno-economic competition between the two. It was an interesting study (probably one of my favourites in my time at