Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and that in six months it would be writing 90% of code. Neither of those predictions came to pass. Now, in a report Anthropic published on Thursday, the company said it was hiring fewer junior technical workers and that human attention has become the new “bottleneck” as it increasingly relies on its Claude AI agents.
Anthropic says AI has changed the way work gets done, and as a result, restructured employment at the company. The report suggests its changes foreshadow the future of work more broadly: as more companies adopt AI agents, software engineers could face a tougher job market while entry-level tech workers struggle to build necessary skills and experience. By outsourcing some coding and sales-related tasks to AI agents, Anthropic said it raised productivity within a few months.
From May 2026 onwards, AI agents logged more work hours than human employees, the report said. Employees now spend about 22% of their time managing Claude agents, more than double the amount a year ago, based on Anthropic’s analysis of their chat summaries. It also says since March 2025 – soon after the release of its agentic AI coding tool Claude Code – entry-level technical hires dropped from nearly 30% to 9%, and headcount dropped from about 21% to 14%.
It attributes the shifts to AI usage, and described its workers as merely “a thin layer atop a growing contingent of AI agents”. While the report provides a small glimpse of the inner workings of the AI heavyweight, some AI researchers are skeptical that it will herald big changes across companies or industries. Instead, they say the findings are likely Anthropic’s attempt to drive its valuation ahead of its initial public offering – similar to how SpaceX boasted about proposed space data centers to boost its market debut in June.
Anthropic’s claims seem to back some tech executives’ view that AI is behind recent waves of corporate layoffs, but research complicates that. Morgan Frank, a Case Western Reserve University researcher on how AI and technological changes affect workers, recently posted a paper that’s in peer review showing that AI-exposed job markets deteriorated well before the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022 and Claude a few months later. State unemployment claims reveal that job markets tanked starting at the beginning of 2022, months before ChatGPT’s release, according to the paper.
Frank said several factors could explain recent job losses, including cutting pandemic-era hires and “AI-washing”, where some bosses credit AI for layoffs they might have made anyway. Julián Posada, a Yale social scientist, also questions Anthropic’s motives for publishing its report. Unlike an economics study, the report lacked an independent assessment by outside auditors, Posada said.
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