At Anthropic, AI agents now outwork humans, and the share of juniors is falling

The AI company Anthropic has studied how AI is changing work internally. The report "How employment is changing at Anthropic" was published on October 16, 2026, by the Anthropic Institute, the company's economics team. The authors are Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory.

According to T2 Online, the report is based on internal data on employment, AI use, output, calendars and hiring decisions, as well as 17 employee interviews.

Agents work more hours than humans

An AI agent is a program that carries out tasks on its own on behalf of the user. In August 2026, hours from interactive AI agents exceeded employee hours by a ratio of 6 to 1. According to T2 Online, the combined hours from autonomous and interactive agents already surpassed human working hours for the first time in March 2026.

Output has also risen. The number of code commits (saved changes to program code) per engineer is five times as high as six months ago. Salespeople closed more deals, and nontechnical employees such as lawyers and payroll staff increased their output.

Fewer juniors in technical roles

Juniors' share of technical department staff fell from 21 percent in early 2025 to 14 percent in August 2026. The share of new hires in technical roles that went to juniors fell from 27 to 9 percent. Technical departments' share of all employees fell from 61 to 56 percent over the past year.

According to T2 Online, engineering and research teams had stopped prioritizing hiring at lower levels by April 2026, and postings for junior roles had been declining since December 2025.

Humans are the bottleneck

T2 Online writes that interactive Claude sessions spend about 80 percent of their time waiting for input from a human. Nontechnical employees would have to spend more than half of the workweek reading everything their Claude sessions produce.

So-called meta-work, meaning instructions to agents and oversight of them, rose from 10 to 22 percent of interactive sessions from the fall of 2025 to the spring of 2026. Meeting time rose 20 percent. Nontechnical employees' sessions with coding agents rose from 2 per month in August 2025 to 90 per month in May 2026.

According to T2 Online, hiring managers weigh autonomy and judgment more heavily and technical domain knowledge less. Mentions of AI tools in candidate assessments for nontechnical roles rose from 7 to about 28 percent between 2024 and 2026.

Caveats

All figures come from Anthropic's own report on its own company and have not been independently verified. The report itself warns that the use of AI tools is not random, so productivity gains may be overestimated. The company grew during the period, which makes it hard to say how much of the decline in juniors is due to AI. The results apply to one company, and it is unclear whether they can be transferred to the rest of the economy. Anthropic presents itself as a possible indicator of how AI may change work elsewhere.