Claude Freed Employees From Routine Work. It Didn’t Free Them From Meetings
Claude can do six hours of work in one hour. But employees at Anthropic are learning that using AI creates a new job that takes a lot of attention: watching over the bots while they work.
Photo: Getty Images
AI tools are spreading quickly across workplaces in the United States. This has made employers and workers wonder, and sometimes worry, about how apps that do tasks automatically will affect jobs and work itself. Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI developers, has shared some early answers. A report from the company explains how its Claude products have already changed the way its employees work, how the company is organized, and how it hires people.
A post on the company's website called “How employment is changing at Anthropic” gives business leaders across the country some ideas about how AI might change their own workplaces. The report, published on October 16, explained that Claude helps employees get more done by taking over more tasks. As a result, the work people do in different jobs is changing a lot. These changes have also led Anthropic to change how it hires and employs people.
“(T)he share of junior-level employees in technical departments at Anthropic slipped from 21 percent to 14 percent since early 2025… (while) the proportion of junior technical hires fell even faster, from 27 percent to 9 percent,” the report noted. “At the same time, the overall employment share of technical departments within Anthropic has fallen, from 61 percent to 56 percent in the last year.”
Bots do more work, freeing employees for other tasks
These changes happened because the bots became more productive. They can produce six hours' worth of work for every 60 minutes an employee spends working. This includes writing code, a task that once required large teams of technical workers. Now that AI handles much of this work, Anthropic has hired fewer technical workers than before. It has also shifted many current employees toward work that the company considers more important.
These changes often involved the kinds of problems and changes at work that both supporters and critics of AI have predicted as the technology spreads.
“These changes have already involved reallocation: employees working at the company for at least a year were 50 percent more likely to move across departments each month in 2026 than they were in 2025,” the report said. “Whole teams have also been reallocated as they handed off their work to agents.”
That is not the only way the company's bots have changed employees' work.