90% of code at Anthropic now written by AI, CEO Dario Amodei says

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, revealed during a discussion with Salesforce's Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference that a staggering 90% of the code at his AI startup is now generated by its AI systems. This bold statement comes in line with Amodei's earlier prediction made earlier this year, where he forecasted that AI would dominate code writing within just six months. Amodei emphasized that despite skepticism surrounding his prediction, the reality within Anthropic and its partner companies confirms its accuracy. "Some people think that prediction is wrong, but within Anthropic and within a number of companies that we work with, that is absolutely true now," he stated. When questioned by Benioff about whether the rise of AI in coding has led to a decrease in engineering hires, Amodei cautioned against misinterpreting the situation. He referred to the phenomenon as a "rebalancing." According to him, teams are now able to achieve productivity levels up to ten times greater due to AI assistance. Amodei explained, "If Claude is writing 90% of the code, what that means, usually, is that you need just as many software engineers. You might need more, because they can leverage AI to focus on the 10% that involves editing the code or tackling the more complex tasks, or supervising a group of AI models. And so what happens is, you just end up being 10 times more productive." The trend of AI taking on significant coding responsibilities is not unique to Anthropic. Earlier this year, Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, noted that a quarter of their current companies are utilizing AI to produce 95% or more of their code. This shift suggests that startups may no longer require large teams of engineers, as indicated by Tan's remarks. Additionally, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has projected that within five years, AI could be responsible for 95% of all coding tasks, reinforcing the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the tech industry.