‘From actually doing work’ to ‘babysitting Claudes’: Anthropic employees on how their jobs changed in the past year

Working at Anthropic, the AI company, has undergone significant changes over the past year, according to a new report. The company's internal trends, which could serve as a leading indicator of how AI will impact work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy, reveal that AI adoption has led to massive boosts in productivity.

Using Claude tools has resulted in producing more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts. However, the report also highlights that human interference is now a bottleneck, with AI agents spending 80% of their session time waiting for human input.

The shift to AI-driven work has altered employees' daily responsibilities. A survey found that 75% of Anthropic employees believe the company's work processes make them more productive, but 20% feel their roles have shifted from "actually doing work to managing Claudes." One employee likened managing AI agents to babysitting, describing it as "equivalent to babysitting children that can’t accurately gauge the importance of different tasks and problems."

Another employee noted the "eternal pressure at Anthropic to move as fast as possible and use Claude for everything," while a third reported that tasks expected to take a week now take three months in other companies.

Anthropic's hiring practices are also evolving, with the proportion of junior hires in technical departments falling from 27% to 9% since early 2025. The share of junior-level technical employees has also decreased from 21% to 14%. This reduction in junior hires is attributed to teams offloading work to Claude, including writing code and finding bugs. As a result, interactive AI agents now log six times as many hours as human employees, with interactive AI agents working as many hours as human employees.