Key Takeaways Anthropic is the AI startup behind Claude Code, an AI coding assistant.
The startup surveyed 132 of its own engineers, conducted 53 detailed interviews and studied internal use data for Claude Code to understand how AI is changing work.
AI tools are improving productivity while leading to concerns about losing skills and jobs.
Anthropic recently conducted a research study of its own engineers to determine how AI is transforming work — and found that AI tools are boosting productivity while sparking concerns about skill atrophy, reduced human collaboration and job loss.
Anthropic shared the findings of its August research study in a blog post published on Tuesday. The startup, last valued at $183 billion in September, surveyed 132 of its own engineers, conducted 53 detailed interviews and studied internal use data for Claude Code, its coding tool. The study sought to get a better understanding of how AI use is changing work at Anthropic, a startup with 3,000 employees.
“We find that AI use is radically changing the nature of work for software developers, generating both hope and concern,” the researchers wrote in the blog post.
Engineers reported getting more work done with the help of AI and being able to succeed at a variety of technical tasks beyond their usual expertise. Workers could fully delegate up to 20% of their tasks to Claude, mainly tedious work.
Related: Anthropic Is Now One of the Most Valuable Startups of All Time: ‘Exponential Growth’
Employees were able to tackle a wider range of tasks, but were concerned that they could lose more specialized technical competence in favor of breadth. Many worried about losing deeper coding skills, like writing and critiquing code, with one employee noting in an interview for the study that it is more difficult to learn when coding assistants like Claude are available to readily code solutions.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in March that AI will write all code for software engineers within a year. “On the jobs side of this, I do have a fair amount of concern,” he said that month at an event.
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