Anthropic has nearly stopped hiring junior staff because AI agents now work six times as many hours

Anthropic is hiring fewer and fewer junior employees in technical roles, while the hours logged by its AI agents keep climbing. According to an internal study published by the AI company, the share of junior positions in technical departments dropped from 21 percent to 14 percent since early 2025. New hires took a bigger hit. The junior share there fell from 27 percent to just 9 percent. Open junior roles declined especially sharply starting in December 2025. Anthropic points to the growing capability of its AI agents as the reason. By August 2026, those agents were logging six times as many work hours as human employees. Tasks like writing code and finding bugs are increasingly handed off to Claude.

First reported by The Decoder. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.