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Anthropic Says AI Agents Cut Its Entry-Level Hiring; Experts Question the Report, Guardian Reports

Bot Mutiny | October 23, 2026

Anthropic published a report on Thursday saying that AI agents have changed how work gets done inside the company and reduced its hiring of junior technical staff, and outside researchers quoted by the Guardian are questioning the report's motives and framing. Anthropic, which the Guardian says could list on the stock market as soon as November, did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.

What Anthropic's report says

According to the Guardian's account, the report says human attention has become the "bottleneck" as Anthropic relies more on its Claude agents. It says the company's "deep adoption of AI" resulted in "producing more code per person, closing more sales per rep, and processing more contracts," and that productivity rose within a few months.

The report states that from May 2026 onward, AI agents logged more work hours than human employees. Employees now spend about 22% of their time managing Claude agents, more than double the share a year earlier, based on Anthropic's analysis of chat summaries. Since March 2025, which the Guardian notes was soon after the release of Claude Code, the report says entry-level technical hires dropped from nearly 30% to 9% and headcount dropped from about 21% to 14%, and it attributes the shifts to AI usage. It describes its workers as "a thin layer atop a growing contingent of AI agents."

The report also floats a possible future: "single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents to rake in billions in revenue." It suggests tech employers should offer workers stock ownership, saying "It is difficult to imagine a version of pro-worker AI adoption in which workers do not hold a financial stake in successful rollout."

What the experts told the Guardian

Julián Posada, a Yale social scientist, questioned why the report was published. "It is written from the perspective of a company that wants to sell shares, a company that really wants people to invest in it," he said. He added that, unlike an economics study, the report lacked an independent assessment by outside auditors.

Dylan Baker, a lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute, called the arrangement of shifting some software development to AI while hiring fewer entry-level workers "shortsighted." Of the "bottleneck" framing, he said: "That's such a strange way to put it."

Morgan Frank, a Case Western Reserve University researcher, has posted a paper that is in peer review showing that AI-exposed job markets deteriorated before ChatGPT launched in November 2022, according to the Guardian. "It doesn't appear that the launch of ChatGPT corresponds to any major increase in loss or worsening outcomes," Frank said. Frank's comments concerned the broader labor market rather than Anthropic's report itself. He pointed to other possible explanations for recent job losses, including cuts to pandemic-era hires and "AI-washing," where bosses credit AI for layoffs they might have made anyway. The Guardian reports that some AI researchers see the report as an attempt to boost Anthropic's valuation ahead of its initial public offering.

Context

The Guardian notes that last year Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and that AI would be writing 90% of code within six months, and that neither prediction came to pass. It also reports that Anthropic released the report one day after pledging to commit 5% of its shares to the "public good," without details.

The question of whether AI is behind corporate job cuts is live elsewhere. Bot Mutiny recently covered Barclays' plan to cut about 5,000 jobs as executives cited AI productivity gains. The Guardian also cites Pew Research Center findings that a majority of Americans are wary of AI, with particular concern about job losses.

The report describes Anthropic's own workforce.