90% of code at Anthropic now written by AI, CEO Dario Amodei says humans still essential

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed that 90% of the code inside the AI startup is now being written by its AI models. Amodei made the comment during a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference on Wednesday.

Amodei reminded Benioff that he had predicted earlier in the year that AI would write 90% of the code within six months and that is already now true inside Anthropic and some of its partners.

“I made this prediction that, you know, in six months, 90% of code would be written by AI models. Some people think that prediction is wrong, but within Anthropic and within a number of companies that we work with, that is absolutely true now.” Amodei said.

When pressed by Benioff if AI writing code had meant a reduction in hiring of engineers, Amodei said that people should not ‘misinterpret’ Claude’s ability to write features and help solve long running bugs. He instead framed it as a sort of “rebalancing,” saying teams can be “10x more productive.” with the AI.

“If Claude is writing 90% of the code, what that means, usually, is, you need just as many software engineers. You might need more, because they can then be more leverage,” Amodei noted

“They can focus on the 10% that’s editing the code or writing the 10% that’s the hardest, or supervising a group of AI models. And so what happens is, you know, you just end up being 10 times more productive,” he added

Amodei isn’t the only one to talk about AI taking a bulk of coding related tasks at companies. Earlier in the year Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan had said that a quarter of Y Combinator’s current crop of companies used AI to write 95% or more of their code.

“What that means for founders is that you don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers,” he said in an interaction earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has also earlier predicted that 95% of all code will be written by AI in the next five years.