AI Displacement Tracker
As of July 2026 (2026-07) · Updated Aug 19, 2026
Multiple AI displacement signals are well above normal. Capability growth, layoffs, or job market contraction are at levels that suggest widening workforce impact.
Score Zones
Five Components
The tracker combines five weighted components that capture different AI capability, adoption, and labor-market observations. The composite does not infer a causal sequence among them. It measures workforce pressure; whether that pressure reaches household budgets is a separate question the American Distress Index tracks.
Layoffs explicitly attributed to AI by the announcing company.
An early-career labor-market measure tracked alongside AI capability, adoption, layoffs, and tech-sector openings.
Information sector (NAICS 51) job openings. Down 67% from the 274,000 2022 peak.
Share of U.S. businesses using AI in any business function. Up 2.7 times from 3.7% in two years.
METR's 50 percent time horizon is the estimated human-expert task duration at which the evaluated agent's fitted success probability is 50 percent; it is not elapsed agent runtime. The current task suite primarily covers self-contained, well-specified software engineering, machine learning, and cybersecurity tasks with clear success criteria, and METR says measurements above 16 hours are unreliable.
Tracker History
The tracker starts in early 2019, when METR began publishing capability benchmarks. It stayed in the Normal–Elevated range through 2023, then accelerated sharply in 2024–2025 as AI capability growth, adoption, and layoffs all surged simultaneously.
How the Tracker Connects to the ADI
The tracker combines capability, adoption, and labor-market observations in one contemporaneous score. The American Distress Index separately measures household financial distress. The proposed capability-to-adoption-to-displacement-to-default sequence is a hypothesis to test, not a causal result of this tracker.
METR's fitted half-success threshold is now 1044.8 hours of estimated human-expert task duration. It is a benchmark estimate, not elapsed agent runtime.
Businesses integrate AI into production. Census BTOS shows 10.0% of firms using AI, up from 3.7% two years earlier.
Workers lose jobs or hours. 140,000 layoffs explicitly attributed to AI in 2025, with tech openings down 67% from their 2022 peak.
Households experiencing a job or hours loss may miss payments. The tracker does not establish that a specific layoff caused a later default or that the ADI will move with a fixed lag.
The workers most exposed to AI — clerical, customer service, data entry, earning $30–55,000 — overlap heavily with FHA borrowers and subprime cardholders — the same households the mortgage delinquency data tracks.
Understanding the Tracker
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the AI Displacement Tracker?
The AI Displacement Tracker is a 0–100 composite score that follows AI workforce displacement across five dimensions: AI-attributed layoffs, tech sector job openings, youth unemployment, business AI adoption, and AI capability growth. It is scored on a Z-anchored scale against a 2023–2024 baseline — the tracker’s own scaling, independent of the ADI, which ranks each input against its own history.
How does the tracker relate to the ADI?
The tracker summarizes AI capability, adoption, and labor-market signals. The ADI separately measures household financial distress. A possible lagged relationship is the research hypothesis; this contemporaneous tracker does not establish causation or forecast a later ADI reading.
Why is the tracker at Serious level?
The current Serious classification reflects the weighted combination of the five component readings for July 2026. The tracker summarizes those concurrent signals; it does not establish that AI caused a labor-market outcome or predict a later ADI reading.
Does a high tracker reading mean mass unemployment?
Not directly. The tracker measures displacement pressure — the combination of capability growth, adoption, and early labor market signals. Whether this translates to broad unemployment depends on retraining speed, new job creation, and policy response. The tracker follows what is happening, not what will happen.
Where does the data come from?
All five components use public federal data or publicly accessible research: BLS (unemployment, JOLTS), Challenger Gray & Christmas (layoff announcements), Census Bureau BTOS (adoption survey), and METR (AI capability benchmarks). No proprietary data, no paywalls.
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