Synopsis
Anthropic's Claude models have rapidly become among the most widely used AI tools in software development and enterprise work. The company's coding products, Claude Code and Claude Co-Work, are designed to automate tasks that once required teams of engineers and knowledge workers.Listen to this article in summarized format
“I am still pretty concerned,” Amodei said in a Bloomberg interview, reaffirming his previous warnings about the labor market consequences of advanced AI.
Anthropic's Claude models have rapidly become among the most widely used AI tools in software development and enterprise work. The company's coding products, Claude Code and Claude Co-Work, are designed to automate tasks that once required teams of engineers and knowledge workers.
"We are seeing right now that AI is making people more productive," he said. "But that's the usual hump."
The real challenge emerges when automation approaches completion, he said.
"You automate 90 percent of the job. Great. People are ten times more productive in the other 10 percent because they're ten times more leveraged," Amodei said. "But eventually it gets close to 100 percent. Now the sequel to that is, well, then you have to find something else for them to do."
The changes are already visible within Anthropic. In the same interview, Boris Cherny, the executive who led the development of Claude Code, said the platform has been writing all of the code for him for the last six months.
"It's writing for almost all of it on my team," Cherny told Bloomberg. "For me personally, it's been writing 100 percent of my code for at least six months."
According to Anthropic's own research, roles in management, finance, and legal professions will be most heavily affected in the near term.
The AI giant on Wednesday pledged a $200 million investment to research AI’s impact on jobs and the economy.
Amodei also published an essay on his personal website in which he proposed better data collection to track AI job displacement, pro-employment policy incentives to slow or reduce displacement and “mechanisms such as universal basic income” if job displacement more permanently drives down labor demand.
That universal basic income could be financed through taxes on “relevant companies” or by raising the capital gains tax, Amodei wrote.
