Anthropic is hiring fewer juniors, says AI now does 6 times more work than humans

AI is changing how Anthropic hires employees. In a new case study, the company says hiring of junior level staff fell from 27 per cent to 9 per cent in a year. At the same time, AI agents reached 6 times the work hours of humans.

AI is changing the way we work, and now Anthropic has released a detailed study on how this is happening inside the company. In a new case study, the AI company says that within the past year, it reduced hiring of junior staff as AI agents began to take on more work within the company.

The study, titled, "How employment is changing at Anthropic," reveals that between May 2025 and May 2026, hiring for junior technical roles at the company fell from 27 per cent to 9 per cent. Meanwhile, AI agents were working six times as many hours as their human handlers.

Anthropic is tracking at-risk jobs

The study found that AI adoption had increased productivity in key areas including engineering, sales, legal and finance. Given the rise of AI agents, more employees within Anthropic are now handling multiple agents at once. One engineer described work as facing "an army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention." This, Anthropic said, had shifted the focus towards the ability of candidates to use AI tools.

While the biggest impact of AI agents came on junior technical roles, other roles also felt some effect. Anthropic said that the team responsible for writing greetings, such as "Coffee and Claude time?" and "Hello night owl," had also delegated the task to agents. The company admitted that this "raised the question of what was left for human writers."

The overall employment share of technical departments within the company also fell from 61 per cent to 56 per cent in the past year.

To understand how AI can impact jobs, Anthropic stated that it had set up an early warning system. This allows the company to start reallocating affected employees to jobs with a skills fit "that may be less immediately at risk." Those working for over a year at the company were 50 per cent more likely to shift departments, the study said. As one executive said, "a workforce that is anxiously worried is not a workforce doing its best work."

AI agents work more than humans now

While Anthropic was hiring fewer junior workers, AI agents were putting in more hours. The company said that AI agent hours first surpassed human working hours in March 2026. Now, the study added, AI agents outnumbered human working hours by 6 to 1. This could give us "advanced signals" about a possible future of work and employment on a broader scale.

And AI was getting better at it too. Researchers tracked 192 engineers who adopted coding agents and 74 who did not. They found that output rose after adoption, with no difference found in the rates at which agent-written and human-written code was subsequently removed.

The use of AI agents was not limited to technical work either. Lawyers, account managers, sales representatives, and other personnel were also using more AI than before. One account executive said Claude automations replaced about 20 per cent of their previous tasks, allowing them to speak to 30 per cent more customers.

However, AI output increased demands on employees. Claude sessions spent about 80 per cent of their time waiting for human input, while reading the output generated for non-technical teams would take more than half their working week.

Anthropic's study comes at a time when the tech industry is still understanding how to implement AI agents. While AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have aggressively pushed for agents at work, others are more concerned about costs. For instance, Accenture reportedly informed employees that it was putting a $29-a-month cap on AI use. Previously, Microsoft, Meta, and Uber have imposed similar restrictions.

The job market, meanwhile, has faced the brunt of AI adoption. Companies such as Oracle, Amazon, and Meta have laid off thousands of workers as they invest more in AI. According to layoffs.fyi, about 323 tech companies have cut over 1,33,000 tech roles this year.