How employment is changing at Anthropic

Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, Peter McCroryHow has AI restructured work and employment at Anthropic? As a company at the frontier of AI adoption, Anthropic could be a leading indicator of how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy.Key findingsAnthropic has been hiring for a smaller share of junior technical positions. This occurred as hours worked by AI agents relative to employees rapidly expanded. By August interactive AI agent hours outnumbered employees’ six to one.As AI agents diffused through the company, Anthropic began producing more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts. Following the same employee over time, output rose as they adopted new AI tools.This acceleration makes human attention the bottleneck for agent output. Even among non-technical employees, reading all the output of their Claude agents would take half their work week. In response, employees turn to “meta-work,” of building visibility tools and monitoring agent pipelines.Changes in work organization are reflected in shifting priorities among hiring managers, who increasingly emphasize autonomy and judgment, relative to technical domain expertise and implementation.IntroductionWhat transformations of work and employment can we expect under increasingly powerful AI? Anthropic is worth studying because it has thoroughly molded its workflows around AI. Agents flit through Slack chats and schedule meetings. They autonomously fix bugs and collectively tackle huge engineering projects. Agent hours worked outnumber human hours 6 to 1. Changes happening at Anthropic now give advanced signals about a possible future of work and employment.This report draws on comprehensive internal Anthropic data covering employment, AI use, output metrics, employee surveys, internal communication patterns, employee calendar data, and hiring decision records. It contextualizes these quantitative data with 17 employee interviews.We find that even as the company grows, relative hiring in junior technical positions has slowed. Productivity for both engineers and non-technical employees has leapt up and did so sharply when they adopted coding agents. Hiring managers increasingly emphasize applicants’ autonomy and judgment relative to specific technical expertise. A defining feature of working in an AI-heavy organization is constant pressure to streamline oneself out of this bottleneck position when possible. One engineer described work as facing “an army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention.” Employees at Anthropic remain critical. But the nature of their contributions has changed.Anthropic has responded to these changes by setting up an early warning system to track jobs at risk of disruption, and as jobs evolve the company has prioritized internal redeployments. These actions, taken at the frontier of both AI development and workplace change, show how specific organizational commitments can shape the impact of AI on employment. But they also raise difficult questions about exactly what those commitments should be.Labor demand at the frontierAnthropic has expanded rapidly. But it has hired less per dollar of revenue than an earlier generation of large tech companies. At five years old, Anthropic takes in between 2–4 times as much revenue per employee as Meta and Google as they crested in their own rapid growth.1What jobs are missing? Within Anthropic, discussion of a decline in demand for junior technical employees emerged in core technical functions in January 2026. The teams that relied most heavily on Claude in their own work found that writing code and finding bugs could increasingly be offloaded to Claude. Newly capable models accelerated this perception: “the thing that raised eyebrows was the uplift for performance engineers in particular and it basically overnight changed what we were looking for.”By April, engineering and research teams had deemphasized hiring for lower band technical positions. When surveyed in the same month, a majority of managers described hiring for a different set of skills due to AI. Around a third of ML and a fifth of SWE managers reported hiring less due to AI.The shift in employment shares is striking. Figure 1 shows that the share of junior-level employees in technical departments at Anthropic slipped from 21% to 14% since early 2025. The proportion of junior technical hires fell even faster, from 27% to 9%. Postings for juniors have fallen particularly sharply since December 2025.Figure 1: Decline of entry-level technical hiring at Anthropic.At the same time, the overall employment share of technical departments within Anthropic has fallen, from 61% to 56% in the last year. As the company expands, technical hiring has continued growing in absolute terms, but intensive hiring in sales, finance, and recruiting has outpaced it. Part of this shift is the natural expansion of business functions as the company scales. Part could reflect coding tools increasingly allowing non-technical employees to make software themselves. For example, a sales representative designed a custom dashboard and pipeline tailored to their work: “a build like this was out of my wheelhouse, especially with the UI, connecting all the tools, the MCPs. But I built this probably in three to four hours, just iterating on it.” Coding-focused AI agent sessions for non-technical employees (identified as those with no code commits at baseline, excluding new hires) leapt from 2 per month in August 2025 to 90 in May 2026.Yet this shift in hiring composition is not only a story about automated coding allowing it to diffuse to other domain experts. Within technical departments, the share of employees not actively coding (defined as those making no code commits in the prior 30 days) fell by almost half over the year through April 2026. Part of this is due to a thinning share of non-engineers: the ratio of engineers to product managers, for example, sits at around 17 to 1 and has increased since 2025. The number of commits from managers has also doubled. The supervising and coordinating roles within technical teams increasingly involve building and shipping code.One area in which non-technical hiring has not accelerated is in the administrative functions that typically scale with a company’s size. A combination of agent assistants, automated review and ticket service outsourcing has left Anthropic clerical-light even as it has grown rapidly. A financial manager built a purchase request review agent and explained to colleagues “it's just trying to find the things that take a lot of hours so they can focus on the other stuff.”Even clerical work tightly connected to in-person interaction has grown slowly. An executive assistant, who built a personal assistant agent for scheduling and email triage, explained: “I think we've already moved past the point of Claude augmenting away the really entry-level admin type role,” and instead focused their work on higher-order “chief of staff” tasks.These changes have already involved reallocation: employees working at the company for at least a year were 50% more likely to move across departments each month in 2026 than they were in 2025. Whole teams have also been reallocated as they handed off their work to agents. Consider one product design team, which wrote content like the greetings on Claude.ai: “Hello night owl;” “Coffee and Claude time?” In spring 2026, the team developed a context graph that effectively guided agents to write compelling product content. This “scaled the team out,” its manager explained, but also raised the question of what was left for human writers. The team then rotated into agent prompting and began writing model evals and prompts for Claude. “Writers who used language to drive human behavior are now using it to drive Claude behavior.”Is AI driving productivity increases at Anthropic?Are these shifts attributable to AI? At Anthropic, humans are a thin layer atop a growing contingent of AI agents. Based on agent session telemetry, in March 2026, the sum of autonomous and interactive agent work hours leapt past human work hours for the first time. Part of this is fleets of agents conducting industrial-scale software engineering, filling in myriad routine tests and checks, conducting maintenance on a growing mass of infrastructure code, and driving concerted campaigns to translate massive codebases. But even narrowing in on the agents deployed by individual employees, as in Figure 2, by August the agents worked 6 times as many hours as their human handlers.Figure 2: Agent hours overtake human hours. Note: We limit to employee-directed interactive sessions and pool subagents. Working time concept is agent runtime, including inference and active tool use, but excluding any wait longer than 30 minutes. Human work hours are calculated as headcount and assumed 40 hours per week.Anthropic is a software producer, and the vast bulk of tokens flowing through these agents is spent producing software code. Dashboards monitor fleets of agents operating across the company. But personal assistant agents also monitor employee calendars and messages, scheduling, sending to-do lists accumulated from incoming messages, and automatically briefing employees on the people and purpose of their upcoming meetings. Tokens touch a growing range of everyday work tasks.Figure 3: Productivity boom across functions. Note: Loess smoother fit across underlying indexed output data.What do all of these tokens amount to? Figure 3 plots output over time for a range of job functions with measurable output. Consistent with prior reports surveying Anthropic engineers and describing automation of model training and research, code commits per engineer have risen the fastest, coming in at 5x their velocity as six months ago. Data scientists are also querying the growing mass of Anthropic data more, asking Claude agents to get real-time metrics