Working at the frontier shapes expectations for the future

Anthropic introduces two Oct 16 reports: how AI is changing hiring and work inside Anthropic (fewer junior hires, agents outworking employees, human attention as the bottleneck), and a survey showing staff expect far faster AI progress than US adults while reasoning about AI and jobs in a similar way.

We’re sharing two reports: the first covers how AI is changing employment inside Anthropic, and the second looks at the gap between how the public and Anthropic employees expect AI to affect work and the economy.

Anthropic staff and US workers don’t seem to have different theories about how AI affects jobs. Instead, they have different experiences of what AI capabilities are. Those different experiences seem closely related to perceptions about what will happen to work in the future.

Anthropic is a company at the frontier of AI adoption, and that adoption has changed the way we hire. We find that over the past year, we're hiring for a smaller share of junior positions, and a smaller share of our employees work in technical roles. At the same time, the rate of hours worked by AI agents has shot up. By March 2026, agents worked more hours than employees. By August, there were six times more agents than employees at Anthropic, and productivity increased.

That’s led to Anthropic producing more code per person, but that’s a notoriously imperfect measure. We see signs of increased productivity elsewhere: we’ve closed more sales per sales representative, and processed more contracts. When our researchers follow the same employee over time, they find the employee’s output rises as their adoption of AI tools increases.

All this acceleration means that, increasingly, the bottleneck is human attention. As a result, employees spend more time building ways to better monitor work their agents are doing.

Anthropic could be a leading indicator of how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy. An AI lab is different from more traditional businesses in how it adopts AI into its work, but research findings about our own workplace may still be instructive about broader transformations, including dynamics for future AI-native companies.

Because Anthropic employees experience AI’s effect on work so differently, it stands to reason that they might have different predictions about AI’s effect on the future of work. That’s what our second report investigates. We surveyed Anthropic employees, and compared them to an August survey of almost 11,000 US adults, fielded by Morning Consult and weighted to be representative of the adult population.

The public expects AI capabilities to advance rapidly in the coming years; Anthropic staff tend to expect even faster progress. There are a number of questions with big gaps between staff and the public. For example, 39% of US adults—and 91% of staff—expect AI will be able to make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030. More than half of Anthropic staff expect AI to be able to do at least 80% of their current work by 2030; only 5% of Americans expect AI to be that capable.

That said, there’s considerable variation in both groups: two out of 10 Anthropic staff have expectations similar to those of the typical US adult. And Anthropic staff and the public also agree on some key questions. In each bucket, people who expect AI to do comparably more of their own work anticipate similar increases in unemployment. In other words, both the public and Anthropic staff have similar economic models of how AI affects the labor market, but ultimately their personal experiences with AI lead them to different expectations for the economy of the future.