Anthropic's Claude has been giving some unusual advice to users.
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When Dan Lorenc, the CEO and cofounder of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, was asked which AI coding tools he expects to use less in the coming year, his answer got right to the point: "Everything that's not Claude Code."Lorenc is far from alone. In a survey of more than two dozen startup founders and venture capitalists, Business Insider found a growing consensus that Anthropic's Claude Code has quickly become the default AI coding tool inside startups, earning high marks for how it handles complex engineering tasks and autonomous workflows."The shift in how code is being developed is like the evolution of woodworking from using hand tools to power tools, and soon full assembly lines," Lorenc said. "For years, we were carving everything by hand. Then AI showed up and gave everyone a circular saw."VCs have been pouring billions into AI coding startups like Lovable, Replit, and Cursor, which announced last month that it gave SpaceX the right to acquire its parent Anysphere later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion if the deal does not go through. Meanwhile, investors have been in a frenzy to back Anthropic, the maker of Claude Code, which is expected to go public by the end of the year.The stakes are high because AI coding has become one of the clearest commercial use cases for generative AI, with startups increasingly relying on these systems not just to write code faster, but to automate engineering work that once required entire teams.Matthew Burris, the senior head of research at the Venture Studio Forum, said that 12 weeks ago, he had never written a single line of code."Claude Code changed that completely," he said. "Today I'm shipping tools that rival what you'd get from a six-figure consulting engagement."
