Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings | TechCrunch

The composition of Anthropic’s workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year, according to a report that the AI company published on Friday.

Anthropic argues that its own workplace trends could be indicators of “how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy,” especially since the company “has thoroughly molded its workflows around AI.” But even if other organizations never embrace AI as thoroughly or in the exact same way as Anthropic, the report offers an intriguing glimpse at how the company currently operates.

Notably, Anthropic is making fewer junior hires, with the proportion of junior-level employees in technical departments falling from 21% to 14% since early 2025, and the proportion of junior technical hires falling even more sharply, from 27% to 9%.

Anthropic also says that technical teams now represent a smaller share of the overall workforce, falling from 61% to 56% — a trend that it attributes to “natural expansion of business functions as the company scales,” as well as “coding tools increasingly allowing non-technical employees to make software themselves.”

One employee reportedly described an “eternal pressure at Anthropic to move as fast as possible and use Claude for everything.” In an April 2026 survey, 27% of employees said they had become more productive because of Claude and 20% said their job had shifted “from actually doing work to managing Claudes”; apparently one engineered compared this to babysitting: “When you are babysitting, every child brings to you concerns with an equal demand for your attention and the various [Claudes] also do that.”

In fact, the report suggests “human attention and judgement” are becoming a “bottleneck” for productivity, as Claude produces a “deluge” of text that needs to be read and organized.

Unsurprisingly, the report argues that AI adoption has made the company more productive, as indicated by “more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts.” The company acknowledges that “more code does not necessarily mean better code or business impact,” but it also hasn’t found any indications that code quality is declining.

The report says that based on calendar data, meeting time per employee is up 20% compared to a year ago, and it’s up 16% for technical contributors. The company attributes this to the importance of “human trust and accountability,” with employees repeatedly describing “face-to-face coordination as indispensable.”