Anthropic makes Claude, an AI that writes code. On Oct. 16, the company published what Claude has done to its own hiring1. Junior engineers made up 27 percent of its technical hires in early 2025. They now make up 9 percent.
Junior engineers fell from 27 percent to 9 percent of Anthropic's technical hires
Share of Anthropic's new technical hires who were junior, early 2025 and its Oct. 16, 2026 report
Each column is the share of Anthropic's new technical hires who were junior: early 2025, then the figure in its Oct. 16, 2026 report.
Source: Anthropic [1]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Early 2025 | 27% |
| Oct. 2026 report | 9% |
Anthropic is still growing, and its technical hiring keeps rising in raw numbers1. The beginners are the group that shrank. About a fifth of its software engineering managers told the company they hire less because of AI. By August, the agents its staff run logged six hours of work for every hour the staff worked.
The easy reading comes fast. AI writes more of the world's code every month. One in three proposed code changes on GitHub, the code platform Microsoft owns, now involves an AI agent2. A year earlier, fewer than one in 10 did.
That reading says AI must be ending the junior coder's job. It treats one company's choice as the whole job market.
Start with that market. Software developer job posts on Indeed rose almost 15 percent from late February 2025, CNBC reported2. Anthropic released Claude Code that same month. All U.S. job posts fell 7 percent over the same stretch.
U.S. software developer job posts rose 15 percent while all job posts fell 7 percent
Change in U.S. job postings on Indeed, late February 2025 to October 2026
Each bar is the percent change in postings since late February 2025, one for software development jobs and one for every job Indeed tracks.
Source: CNBC [2]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Software development jobs | 15% |
| All U.S. job postings | −7% |
The rise went mostly to experienced engineers. Senior roles made up 71 percent of the growth from May 2025 to May 2026, Indeed found. Jobs with AI in the title made up 37 percent, and one job can count in both groups.
Young developers feel the gap. Employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20 percent from 2024, Stanford researchers found2. In an iCIMS survey, 51 percent of Gen Z respondents called AI the greatest threat to their job security, Fortune reported5.
Eric Kutcher, McKinsey's North America chair, reads the job posts as good news for the trade2. "It wasn't that long ago that we were reading the headline that there will be no more need for software developers," he said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." Companies produce more code than ever, he said, and developers who work with AI stay in demand.
Erik Brynjolfsson, who directs Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, makes the strongest case that AI is hurting young workers3. His team reads payroll records from ADP, which covers about one in six U.S. workers. For workers aged 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI, employment is shrinking 3.8 percent a year. "If you take out the entire tech industry, or take out all tech-related occupations, or you slice it different ways, you still get this effect," he said.
Anders Humlum, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, sees companies choosing differently4. He points to a study by Ramp and Revelio Labs of more than 21,000 U.S. firms. At the firms making the biggest AI investments, entry-level head count grew 12 percent in the two years after they adopted AI.
"If we look at the heavy users of these tools, the firms that are paying a lot of money to Anthropic and OpenAI to subscribe to their models, they are hiring more than anyone else," Humlum told NPR4.
Harvard economist David Deming blames remote work4. Junior hiring started falling about six months before ChatGPT came out, he told NPR. All three economists agree that a major shift in work is underway.
So Anthropic's chart is real, and it records one company's answer. Anthropic builds the agents, so it put them to work first. Other heavy AI users bought the same kind of tools and hired more beginners. The chart shows a choice, and every employer still makes its own.
That choice has a price, and Sneha Puri named it. Puri is an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab2. "Today's entry-level talent becomes tomorrow's senior experts," she said. "If employers don't build those pipelines now, they're not going to have senior talent they need 10 years down the line."
A hiring manager can keep a junior seat on every team that runs AI agents. Puri says companies still need developers to oversee the code AI writes, and a junior can learn that job beside a senior. A young coder can look for those teams first.
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Sources
- Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, "How employment is changing at Anthropic," Anthropic, Oct. 16, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic
- Corynn Winston, "AI is automating coding. So why are software developer job postings on the rise?," CNBC, Oct. 11, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/11/ai-software-developer-jobs.html
- Nick Lichtenberg, "'It's not going away': The Stanford economist who called the AI entry-level jobs crisis early has the receipts," Fortune, June 27, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/06/27/what-is-ai-impact-entry-level-jobs-stanford-adp-canaries-brynjolfsson-richardson/
- Lee V. Gaines, "Many recent grads say AI is making it harder to get a job. Economists aren't so sure," NPR, Aug. 18, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/18/nx-s1-5910677/recent-college-graduates-employment-job-artificial-intelligence
- Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, "'An army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention': Anthropic calls human attention the bottleneck in the botsitting world to come," Fortune, Oct. 19, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/10/19/work-botsitting-meetings-army-of-claudes-anthropic/