Anthropic's own study found its AI agents logged six times the hours of its staff, while junior workers' share of new technical hires fell from 27% to 9%.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, says its AI agents are logging about six times the working hours of the employees who direct them. The same Oct. 16 study found that junior employees made up just 9% of new technical hires, down from 27% in early 2025. An agent is an AI program that carries out tasks on its own, such as writing code or fixing bugs.
Anthropic looked at employee records, AI logs, surveys and 17 interviews. Total technical hiring grew, but the junior share of new hires shrank. Junior employees also fell from 21% to 14% of existing technical positions. The report did not give actual counts of junior hires.
The six-to-one figure counts agent activity against human hours estimated with a 40-hour week. It does not mean six workers were replaced. The study also could not establish that automation drove the overall drop in junior hiring. The Decoder reported that junior technical job postings began falling sharply in December 2025.
Engineers made about five times as many code commits per person over six months. A commit is a saved set of code changes. Anthropic itself warned that more output does not prove business value.
Dealroom highlighted that interactive Claude sessions spent around 80% of elapsed time waiting for a human. Time spent managing agents rose from 10% to 22% of sessions. One engineer described facing "an army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention."
For anyone running a team, the lesson is that faster work can come with a cost. If agents take over coding and bug fixes, entry-level staff lose the hands-on tasks that once taught them the job. Employers may need new ways to train people, and a clear plan for who reviews the AI's output.
If AI takes over entry-level tasks, plan how new hires will still learn and who will check the AI's work.
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