Anthropic AI — Even AI Pioneer Anthropic Cuts Jobs as Agents Work 6x Longer Than Humans
Even Anthropic AI, a leading artificial intelligence company, is feeling the job losses caused by the technology it creates. This year, AI agents have worked more than six times as many hours as human employees. At the same time, the number of junior developers hired has fallen to one-third of last year's level. In response, Anthropic has decided to give 5% of its company ownership to a public interest fund. The fund aims to address the social and economic effects of AI on jobs. In effect, the company that develops AI is proposing a way to deal with the major changes caused by its own technology.
On the 18th, local time, Anthropic announced that AI can create great economic value but can also make work less secure for many people. To address this problem, the company created the 'Anthropic Public Interest Fund' and committed 5% of its company ownership to it. Each time the company's value rises to 50% above a benchmark set internally, the board of directors may choose to give another 2% of the company's ownership to the fund. The fund will consider different ways to help, including programs to reduce AI's impact on workers and direct payments to specific groups affected by AI.
Anthropic said that AI is developing so quickly that it is making the job market less stable and causing sudden changes in employment. These changes are already happening inside the company. An internal report about the work environment, released by Anthropic on the 16th, said that junior technical jobs are quickly becoming less common because AI can now do tasks such as writing code and finding bugs, or errors, in it.
The share of new hires in junior technical jobs fell from about 27% in early last year to 9% in May this year. The share of junior employees among all technical staff also dropped, from 21% to 14%.
The number of administrative workers, who would usually increase as a company grows, has barely changed. Instead, AI agents have taken over some of their work. One executive secretary at Anthropic said that Claude is already handling simple office tasks, allowing the secretary to move on to more advanced work similar to that of a 'chief of staff.'
In March this year, AI agents at Anthropic began working more hours than human employees. By August, based on working hours alone, AI was working six times as much as humans. During this period, researchers found that employees spent more than half of their weekly working hours simply reading the large amount of work produced by AI agents. This means that the time and attention people have to check AI's work have become a major limit on how quickly AI can be used.
The Anthropic Research Institute, the company's own research group that wrote the report, found that Anthropic employees expect AI to take over 75% of their work by 2030. People who already have jobs may be able to keep them by using AI to produce more valuable work. But a bigger problem is emerging: young people and newcomers trying to enter the job market may find it difficult to get jobs at all.