Anthropic is hiring a smaller share of junior technical staff, while AI agents' working hours now outnumber its employees' six to one, according to a recent report published by the company. The report focuses on how AI has changed work and hiring inside the company, and the authors call "the shift in employment shares is striking."
According to the report authored by academics and researchers -Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, Peter McCrory - "the share of junior-level employees in technical departments at Anthropic slipped from 21% to 14% since early 2025. The proportion of junior technical hires fell even faster, from 27% to 9%. Massenkoff and McCrory are economists at Anthropic while Wilmers is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Catipon is a senior data scientist at Atlassian's Team Anywhere Lab.
"Postings for juniors have fallen particularly sharply since December 2025."
The findings were based on internal data and 17 employee interviews.
The Claude maker has tripled in size in a year, so the data points to a falling share and not a hiring freeze. Technical hiring still grew in absolute terms.
The Claude Effect
Teams that relied most on Claude found it could increasingly take over writing code and finding bugs, the report says. By April, engineering and research teams had deprioritised lower-level technical hiring. In a survey that month, around a third of machine-learning (ML) managers and a fifth of software-engineering managers said they were hiring less because of AI.
Code commits per engineer are about five times what they were six months ago, though the authors note more code doesn't necessarily mean better code. One engineer described work as facing "an army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention."
The report also highlights that employees at Anthropic remain critical, but the nature of their contributions has changed.
Hiring managers now stress autonomy and judgment over specific technical expertise. They also increasingly focus on whether candidates effectively use AI.
"In 2024, hiring managers noted candidates' track record on AI tooling in around 5% of assessments for technical roles, and 7% for non-technical roles. By 2026, these rates had tripled for technical roles and quadrupled for non-technical roles."
Anthropic has set up an early warning system to track jobs at risk and is moving employees to other roles. The authors acknowledge that none of this directly fixes the slowdown in junior hiring, and appeal for government retraining and income support. They also caution that many of Anthropic's practices can't be replicated across the economy.