At Anthropic, AI agents work six times as many hours as human staff, and recruitment of junior staff has plummeted

An internal report by Anthropic quantifies the impact of its own agents: the proportion of junior technical recruits has fallen from 27 per cent to 9 per cent, productivity has risen, and human attention has become the bottleneck.

Anthropic has taken itself as the subject of study. Based on its internal data (headcount, use of AI, production indicators, surveys, agendas, hiring decisions) and 17 interviews, the team of economists describes a company where, in August 2026, the working hours of interactive AI agents exceeded those of employees by a ratio of six to one. The volume of code per person, the number of contracts processed and the sales closed per salesperson have increased, and the report observes the increase in the same employee when he or she adopts a new tool.

Fewer juniors, more "meta-work"

The setback is in early careers: in technical departments, the share of junior employees has fallen from 21% to 14% since the beginning of 2025, and that of junior hires from 27% to 9%, with job openings falling especially since December 2025. About a third of machine learning managers and a fifth of software engineering managers say they are hiring less because of AI, and now favor autonomy and judgment over sharp technical expertise. Technical departments now account for only 56% of the workforce, compared to 61% a year earlier.

The report highlights a new problem: reading everything their agents produce would take half the week, even for non-technical employees. Employees are therefore devoting an increasing share of their time to building tools for supervising agent chains. Anthropic says it has set up an early warning system on threatened positions and gives priority to internal mobility, while acknowledging that the exact nature of these commitments remains to be defined.