Getting started

aieconindex provides tidy R access to the Anthropic Economic Index (AEI) dataset hosted on Hugging Face. The AEI is a recurring release from Anthropic that maps usage of the Claude family of large language models to occupations and tasks using the O*NET taxonomy and the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system.

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("charlescoverdale/aieconindex")
library(aieconindex)

Discovering releases

The Anthropic Economic Index is released as dated snapshots (typically every few months). aei_releases() lists the snapshots available on Hugging Face.

aei_releases()

You can fetch the file tree of any single release with aei_files(). This is useful when you want to know exactly what is available before downloading anything.

aei_files("2025-03-27", recursive = FALSE)

Fetching a usage table

aei_index() is the convenience wrapper for the canonical usage table of a release. The shape and exact filename of that table varies across releases (the AEI restructured its directory layout in late 2025); this function papers over that variation.

df <- aei_index("latest", source = "claude_ai", variant = "raw")
head(df)

The source argument selects between Claude.ai consumer traffic ("claude_ai") and first-party API traffic ("1p_api"). The variant argument selects between raw counts ("raw") and tables already enriched with O*NET and SOC metadata ("enriched").

Fetching arbitrary files

For files that aren’t covered by aei_index(), use aei_download():

soc <- aei_download("2025-03-27", "SOC_Structure.csv")
hierarchy <- aei_download("2025-09-15",
                          "data/output/request_hierarchy_tree_claude_ai.json")

CSV files come back as data frames; JSON files come back as parsed lists.

The aei_tbl class

All data-returning functions emit an object of class aei_tbl: a data.frame with provenance metadata stored in the aei_query attribute. Inspect it directly:

attr(df, "aei_query")

The class also dispatches a custom print(), summary(), and [ method that preserves the metadata when the table is subset.

Caching

Downloaded files are cached under tools::R_user_dir("aieconindex", "cache"). Override with options(aieconindex.cache_dir = "/your/path") before the first call. Inspect the cache with aei_cache_info() and clear it with aei_cache_clear().

Citing the data

The Anthropic Economic Index dataset is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). When you use the data in published work, cite it.

aei_cite("2026-03-24", format = "bibtex")

aei_cite() accepts format = c("text", "bibtex", "bibentry") and either a release id or "all" (the default) to cite the project as a whole.

Getting started with aieconindex