is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
Boris Cherny gets recognized in public relatively often. At the bar, at the airport, and in generally any public space, people want to take selfies with the creator and head of Claude Code.
For the last couple of months, Anthropic’s Claude and its coding platform have been having a moment — on social media, in engineers’ circles, and in C-suite offices. Claude Code reached newfound popularity over the holidays, when people spent days or weeks building anything from a tool for viewing MRI results to a Goodreads alternative to an AI-generated T-shirt design contest with a complex judicial system. X posts in January proclaimed that “we are witnessing an irreversible trend” of Anthropic “taking the lead” from OpenAI, asking what Anthropic had possibly “put into” the model to make it so capable, and wondering if this meant “the fall of” OpenAI.
Between December 29th and January 26th, Anthropic’s word-of-mouth exposure spiked by 13 percentage points compared to the prior 30-day period, while OpenAI’s had dropped slightly, according to data from Caliber, a stakeholder intelligence platform. In November 2025, Claude Code passed $1 billion in revenue, according to Anthropic. The company is also reportedly in talks to double its latest funding round to $20 billion (at a $350 billion valuation) due to a spike in investor demand.
Now, the company is releasing a new model, Opus 4.6. Anthropic calls Claude a “direct upgrade” from its predecessor, with improved speed and precision for agentic work of all kinds, from coding to creating presentations in Excel and PowerPoint. Dianne Na Penn, Anthropic’s head of research product management, told The Verge that Opus 4.6 is an “evolution from past models” in that it can “think” longer about more complex questions.
After months at the peak of the hype cycle due to the recent successes of Claude Code, Anthropic is looking to secure its spot with the release of Opus 4.6. But will the company be able to maintain the position it’s enjoyed since the holidays?
“I think we’ll remember December 2025 as this inflection point where all of a sudden everything changed,” Mike Brevoort, principal architect at warehouse automation startup Mytra, told The Verge. He recalled testing Claude Code and other tools over the holiday break, and after using Anthropic’s model to build a prototype, he recalled having what he called a ”‘water in the face’” moment: “‘Wait a minute, that’s possible?’” To him, “Claude is becoming the verb now, or the noun, in the similar way that ChatGPT was as it launched. It’s been this interesting flip that’s happened.”
While tech workers and leaders across a laundry list of different sectors were heads-down using Claude Code, Cherny was off on a houseboat in Copenhagen doing the same — except he was using Claude Code to build itself. With more than five Claude agents running in the cloud on his behalf, Cherny shipped more than 300 pull requests in December, his most productive month at Anthropic in his year-and-a-half career there (besides his two-week stint at Cursor AI). Since November, Cherny has used Claude Code to write 100 percent of his code — a 10x increase from a year ago. Across other teams at Anthropic, Claude Code writes between 70 to 90 percent of code, according to the company, and about 90 percent of Claude Code code is written with the tool itself.
Anthropic first released Claude Code in February 2025, and its recent in-vogue status has been a long time coming, according to more than a dozen tech industry leaders and engineers The Verge spoke with. Anthropic told The Verge that in the past year, it has increased eightfold its number of business customers that each represent more than $1 million in revenue run rate. The company also won more categories than any of its competitors in Scale AI’s “Model of the Year” awards, including “best agentic model” for its performance on popular leaderboards and benchmarks.
Still, the pace of developers switching to Claude Code over the holidays “is not something I think any of us anticipated,” Maggie Basta, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, said. “The move from different agentic coding interfaces to Claude Code has been pretty astonishing.”
... continue reading