Anthropic’s first developer conference kicked off in San Francisco on Thursday, and while the rest of the industry races toward artificial general intelligence, at Anthropic the goal of the year is deploying a “virtual collaborator” in the form of an autonomous AI agent.
“We’re all going to have to contend with the idea that everything you do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a press briefing. “This will happen.”
As roughly 500 attendees munched breakfast sandwiches with an abnormal amount of arugula, and Anthropic staffers milled about in company-issued baseball caps, Amodei took the stage with his chief product officer, Mike Krieger.
“When do you think there will be the first billion-dollar company with one human employee?” Krieger asked. Amodei, wearing a light-gray jacket and a pair of Brooks running shoes, replied without skipping a beat: “2026.” (Later in the press lounge, a spokesperson said they dub this version of Amodei “professor panda” due to his casual-professional attire and his love for pandas—his Slack profile picture is him with a stuffed panda.
There’s a common company line you’ll hear about agents, and Krieger got to it quickly: They won’t replace employees, just help human workers with tasks. “They’re moving from just being engineers to being managers of several autonomous agents, tackling everything from a simple coding task to complex, full-stack development projects across multiple code bases,” Krieger said. “It took our technical onboarding time to get engineers up to speed from two to three weeks to two to three days.”
It’s a belief echoed by Anthropic’s top brass. Cofounder Jack Clark has said he expects people to “manage fleets of AI agents,” while Amodei says he believes software engineers are necessary (for now) to guide models. Still, as the models get more capable in areas from coding to creative writing, it certainly seems like redundancies are imminent.
“I think we’re just at the beginning of what we can do with the new generation of model in terms of tasks,” Amodei said, noting that he’s particularly excited about Opus’ ability to aid in cybersecurity and biomedical research.
Anthropic is making a big push into biomedical research, offering up to $20,000 in API credits to researchers in biology and genetics. “We have found that the [new] model’s abilities in biology are substantially better,” Amodei said in a press briefing. This has contributed to Claude Opus 4’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear risk level, making it the highest risk model Anthropic has released to date based on its Responsible Scaling Policy.
After the morning keynote, journalists were ushered from the dark auditorium to a sunny deck upstairs, and I went to scavenge for snacks and doodads—I got a handful of Anthropic magnets and a tote bag that says “Code w/ Claude.” After an hour of media gossip and diet cokes, we headed back down for a press briefing with Amodei (who skipped into his chair) and Krieger.
In March, Amodei had said that “90 percent of code” will be written by AI within the next six months. So I was curious to ask both executives how much of Anthropic’s code is currently written by Claude.
“Something like over 70 percent of [Anthropic’s] pull requests are now Claude code written,” Krieger told me. As for what those engineers are doing with the extra time, Krieger said they’re orchestrating the Claude codebase and, of course, attending meetings. “It really becomes apparent how much else is in the software engineering role,” he noted.
The pair fiddled with Voss water bottles and answered an array of questions from the press about an upcoming compute cluster with Amazon (Amodei says “parts of that cluster are already being used for research,”) and the displacement of workers due to AI (“I don’t think you can offload your company strategy to something like that,” Krieger said).
We’d been told by spokespeople that we weren’t allowed to ask questions about policy and regulation, but Amodei offered some unprompted insight into his views on a controversial provision in President Trump’s megabill that would ban state-level AI regulation for 10 years: “If you’re driving the car, it’s one thing to say ‘we don’t have to drive with the steering wheel now.’ It’s another thing to say ‘we’re going to rip out the steering wheel, and we can’t put it back in for 10 years,’” Amodei said.
What does Amodei think about the most? He says the race to the bottom, where safety measures are cut in order to compete in the AI race.
“The absolute puzzle of running Anthropic is that we somehow have to find a way to do both,” Amodei said, meaning the company has to compete and deploy AI safely. “You might have heard this stereotype that, ‘Oh, the companies that are the safest, they take the longest to do the safety testing. They’re the slowest.’ That is not what we found at all.”
After an array of journalist-exclusive fireside chats with Anthropic’s top researchers, including researcher and philosopher Amanda Askell, cofounder Chris Olah, and researcher Jan Leike, attendees poured out of the event center into Waymos and Ubers or waited around for the after-party.
What I heard from Krieger on Wednesday, and from a spokesperson at the conference, is that the company decided to throw this conference now because it’s finally a big enough company to host one.
The company has doubled in size in the past year to 1,300 employees and is valued at a whopping $61.5 billion. For a company that once positioned itself as the careful cousin in a reckless industry, Anthropic seems ready to step into the spotlight—and eager to host the party.
