ANTHROPIC’S FIRSTdeveloper conference kicked off in San Francisco on Thursday, and while the rest of the industry races toward artificial general intelligence, at Anthropic the goal of the year is deploying a “virtual collaborator” in the form of an autonomous AI agent.
“We're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything you do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a press briefing. “This will happen.”
As roughly 500 attendees munched breakfast sandwiches with an abnormal amount of arugula, and Anthropic staffers milled about in company-issued baseball caps, Amodei took the stage with his chief product officer, Mike Krieger.
“When do you think there will be the first billion-dollar company with one human employee?” Krieger asked. Amodei, wearing a light-gray jacket and a pair of Brooks running shoes, replied without skipping a beat: “2026.” (Later in the press lounge, a spokesperson said they dub this version of Amodei “professor panda” due to his casual-professional attire and his love for pandas—his Slack profile picture is him with a stuffed panda.
There’s a common company line you’ll hear about agents, and Krieger got to it quickly: They won’t replace employees, just help human workers with tasks. “They're moving from just being engineers to being managers of several autonomous agents, tackling everything from a simple coding task to complex, full-stack development projects across multiple code bases,” Krieger said. “It took our technical onboarding time to get engineers up to speed from two to three weeks to two to three days.”
