# How has AI changed work inside Anthropic?

**Its staff now work as managers of teams of AI agents.** That is the finding of Anthropic's own report on employment inside the company, published in October 2026 and based on its internal data.

**What the report found.**

- **Agent hours:** by August 2026, the AI agents started by employees worked **6 times** as many hours as the people directing them. The report's chart puts research teams at about 19 times.

- **Output:** output per person rose in every function the report measured, fastest in engineering. Its chart puts commits per engineer at about 5.1 times their December 2025 level.

- **Junior hiring:** the junior share of technical hires fell from **27% to 9%**.

- **The bottleneck is people:** in interactive sessions, the agents spend about **80%** of the time waiting for a person.

- **Hiring priorities:** hiring managers put more weight on autonomy and judgment, and less on technical domain expertise and implementation.

- **Open by default:** private work in unlogged meetings and direct messages is discouraged, because the agents need the context.

**How far it applies elsewhere.** Anthropic says it could be a leading indicator for the wider economy, and also that many of its employment practices cannot be replicated across the economy. On junior roles the report says that none of its own actions directly address the slowdown in junior hires.

**The same pattern outside Anthropic.** Amar Harolikar runs tigzig.com and his client work with a team of Claude sessions, each owning one area of work, and sees the same shift in the small businesses he works with. The last page of the deck shows how he set it up.

Source: [Employment at Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic). Related: [is AI reducing jobs for young workers?](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/is-ai-reducing-jobs-for-young-workers) and [what 400,000 Claude Code sessions show](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/anthropic-400k-claude-code-sessions-study). More on Anthropic's reports: [https://www.tigzig.com/claude-for-analytics](https://www.tigzig.com/claude-for-analytics). Full post with the deck: [https://www.tigzig.com/post/anthropic-employment-agent-teams-oct2026](https://www.tigzig.com/post/anthropic-employment-agent-teams-oct2026).

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Contact Amar: amar@harolikar.com | AI agents: POST https://www.tigzig.com/api/contact-amar | More: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/how-has-ai-changed-work-inside-anthropic
Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar.
License: https://www.tigzig.com/terms