Here’s How AI Is Impacting Work

Anthropic recently conducted a research study of its own engineers to determine how AI is transforming work — and found that AI tools are boosting productivity while sparking concerns about skill atrophy, reduced human collaboration and job loss.

Anthropic shared the findings of its August research study in a blog post published on Tuesday. The startup, last valued at $183 billion in September, surveyed 132 of its own engineers, conducted 53 detailed interviews and studied internal use data for Claude Code, its coding tool. The study sought to get a better understanding of how AI use is changing work at Anthropic, a startup with 3,000 employees.

“We find that AI use is radically changing the nature of work for software developers, generating both hope and concern,” the researchers wrote in the blog post.

Engineers reported getting more work done with the help of AI and being able to succeed at a variety of technical tasks beyond their usual expertise. Workers could fully delegate up to 20% of their tasks to Claude, mainly tedious work.

Employees were able to tackle a wider range of tasks, but were concerned that they could lose more specialized technical competence in favor of breadth. Many worried about losing deeper coding skills, like writing and critiquing code, with one employee noting in an interview for the study that it is more difficult to learn when coding assistants like Claude are available to readily code solutions.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in March that AI will write all code for software engineers within a year. “On the jobs side of this, I do have a fair amount of concern,” he said that month at an event.

Some Anthropic engineers are also worried about their jobs, expressing genuine uncertainty about the future. In the study, one employee noted that it was “hard to say” what their job might look like in the next few years. Others were “optimistic in the short term” but predicted that “AI will end up doing everything” in the long run.

One employee said in the report: “It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”

The addition of AI also means that workplace social dynamics are undergoing significant changes. Employees often go to Claude with questions, rather than their peers, resulting in fewer opportunities for mentorship and collaboration.

A separate report on AI in the workplace, released in January by McKinsey, found that nearly all employees (94%) report familiarity with AI tools and the majority of workers (59%) describe themselves as optimistic about AI. Some of the top concerns cited by employees as risks associated with AI are cybersecurity, inaccuracy and workforce displacement.

Anthropic recently conducted a research study of its own engineers to determine how AI is transforming work — and found that AI tools are boosting productivity while sparking concerns about skill atrophy, reduced human collaboration and job loss.

Anthropic shared the findings of its August research study in a blog post published on Tuesday. The startup, last valued at $183 billion in September, surveyed 132 of its own engineers, conducted 53 detailed interviews and studied internal use data for Claude Code, its coding tool. The study sought to get a better understanding of how AI use is changing work at Anthropic, a startup with 3,000 employees.