{"id":938700,"date":"2026-10-24T01:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T01:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/938700\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T01:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T01:26:10","slug":"experts-cast-doubt-on-anthropic-report-detailing-how-ai-has-altered-work-at-the-company-anthropic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/938700\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts cast doubt on Anthropic report detailing how AI has altered work at the company | Anthropic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half<\/a> of entry-level white-collar jobs and that in six months it would be writing 90% of code<\/a>. Neither of those predictions came to pass.<\/p>\n

Now, in a report<\/a> Anthropic published on Thursday, the company said it was hiring fewer junior technical workers and that human attention has become the new \u201cbottleneck\u201d as it increasingly relies on its Claude AI agents.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs AI diffuses and improves, the organization of work could shift,\u201d Anthropic\u2019s report reads before offering a potential future. \u201cOne possibility is single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents to rake in billions in revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its report, Anthropic touts its \u201cdeep adoption of AI\u201d, which it claims resulted in \u201cproducing more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts\u201d. By outsourcing some coding and sales-related tasks to AI agents, Anthropic said it raised productivity within a few months.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s analysis of their chat summaries.<\/p>\n

It also says since March 2025 \u2013 soon after the release of its agentic AI coding tool Claude Code \u2013 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 \u201ca thin layer atop a growing contingent of AI agents\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s attempt to drive its valuation ahead of its initial public offering \u2013 similar to how SpaceX boasted about proposed space datacenters to boost its market debut in June.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s claims seem to back some tech executives\u2019 view<\/a> that AI is behind recent waves of corporate layoffs, but research complicates that.<\/p>\n

Morgan Frank, a Case Western Reserve University researcher on how AI and technological changes affect workers, recently posted a paper<\/a> that\u2019s 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\u2019s release, according to the paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t appear that the launch of ChatGPT corresponds to any major increase in loss or worsening outcomes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Frank said several factors could explain recent job losses, including cutting pandemic-era hires and \u201cAI-washing\u201d, where some bosses credit AI for layoffs they might have made anyway.<\/p>\n

Juli\u00e1n Posada, a Yale social scientist, also questions Anthropic\u2019s motives for publishing its report.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is written from the perspective of a company that wants to sell shares, a company that really wants people to invest in it,\u201d said Posada, author of the book Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n

Unlike an economics study, the report lacked an independent assessment by outside auditors, Posada said. Its figures and graphs only tell part of the story, without revealing how Anthropic\u2019s workers feel about their work or how they are actually engaging with the models, he said.<\/p>\n

Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the non-profit Distributed AI Research Institute, was also curious about how Anthropic\u2019s developers feel about the changes. Shifting some software development to AI, while hiring few entry-level workers and having the remaining engineers wrangle AI agents seems \u201cshortsighted\u201d, they said.<\/p>\n

Baker is also surprised by Anthropic\u2019s human \u201cbottleneck\u201d characterization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s such a strange way to put it,\u201d they said. \u201cIt fundamentally misunderstands how software is written, architected and designed. It\u2019s such a social, interpersonal and human process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s report quotes an unnamed engineer, who described facing \u201can army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention\u201d. That doesn\u2019t sound like a fruitful work environment, Baker said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t think really thoughtful, well-designed products are coming out of that team.\u201d<\/p>\n

As generative AI products proliferate, a majority of Americans<\/a> are wary of AI, with particular concerns about AI-related job losses, according to Pew Research Center. In its report, Anthropic suggests that tech employers should offer their workers stock ownership, posing this as a potential solution to rising concerns. \u201cIt is difficult to imagine a version of pro-worker AI adoption in which workers do not hold a financial stake in successful rollout,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

Anthropic did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n

Anthropic, which could debut on the stock market as soon as November, released its employment report one day after pledging to commit<\/a> 5% of its shares to the \u201cpublic good\u201d, though it did not provide details. Critics noted that philanthropy has long doubled as a reputation builder used by tech titans like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n

But Anthropic, and its claims that it is improving how work gets done could face tougher scrutiny as it nears its IPO. A draft of the company\u2019s S-1 filing revealed that Anthropic had an $80bn net loss<\/a> over the first half of this year, and that it received a junk credit rating<\/a> in June. Considering Anthropic\u2019s slowing revenue growth, investors now project a valuation<\/a> of $1.5tn, down from earlier estimates of $2tn or more<\/a>. At the same time, Anthropic\u2019s cloud computing partner, CoreWeave, has become swamped in AI debt and its stock is plummeting<\/a>, fueling concerns that the AI bubble may begin to deflate.<\/p>\n

Regardless of when or whether the bubble pops, software engineers and other tech workers will surely be affected, Baker said. The question is how that will play out.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is that there is a reckoning, a reassessment or re-evaluation of how much this has always been about human work,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":938701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-938700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/938701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}