Experts cast doubt on Anthropic report detailing how AI has altered work at the company

Experts cast doubt on Anthropic report detailing how AI has altered work at the company Anthropic claims AI will shift how work gets done and labor demand – but some experts are skeptical of the vision

L ast year, the 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.

“As AI diffuses and improves, the organization of work could shift,” Anthropic’s report reads before offering a potential future. “One possibility is single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents to rake in billions in revenue.”

In its report, Anthropic touts its “deep adoption of AI”, which it claims resulted in “producing more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts”. 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 probably Anthropic’s attempt to drive its valuation ahead of its initial public offering – similar to how SpaceX boasted about proposed space datacenters 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.