Will AI Replace Your OSINT Job?
We did the Research So You Don't Have To.
Welcome back, the OSINT Jobs Team here.
This week we go deep. Anthropic published a study on AI and the labor market, and we used it as a lens to look at our own industry.
We pulled in findings from our Community Survey, hundreds of analyzed job descriptions, and four years of watching this field evolve week by week. The result is our most research-driven edition yet.
If you’ve ever asked whether AI will replace your OSINT job, this one’s for you.
Plus, a summary of the latest tradecraft tips and industry news from last week. As usual, never older than a week.
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Is AI Coming for Your OSINT Job? Anthropic Has Some Answers — So Do We
Anthropic published a paper this week — Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence — that adds something significant to the debate around AI replacing jobs, and it deserves attention.
At its core is a new metric called observed exposure, built to measure not just what AI can theoretically do, but what people actually use it for in professional settings. Tested against early data, it finds limited evidence that AI has affected employment to date.
To measure exposure, the team combined the O*NET database covering around 800 US occupations, Anthropic’s own Claude usage data, and third-party estimates of whether an LLM can theoretically make a task at least twice as fast.
Computer programmers top the list at 74.5%, followed by customer service representatives at 70.1% and data entry keyers at 67.1%. At the other end, 30% of workers sit at zero coverage: cooks, motorcycle mechanics, and bartenders.
The headline finding cuts both ways. AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability, and there’s no systematic rise in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022. But hiring of younger workers into exposed roles has started to slow.
What does this mean for the OSINT industry? What we’re seeing through our community survey and four years of weekly newsletters points in a similar direction and when mapped against what Anthropic found, the picture for OSINT gets specific.
AI is embedding itself across the full workflow, from collection and analysis to processing and report writing, amplifying tradecraft rather than replacing it. But the skills needed to use it well are unevenly distributed, and the hiring landscape hasn’t caught up.
We've shared our community survey findings openly and if you haven't read them yet, they're free for everyone.
But in this edition, our premium members get more: a deeper look at actual hiring trends across the industry, based on an analysis of job descriptions from around the world. What skills matter, where AI replaces or augments, and how to catch up to grow your AI skills.
