Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
AI can perform tasks such as writing, coding, reasoning, and researching with great accuracy — all tasks that are key to starting your own company. That begs the question: Can AI help people start their very own billion-dollar business? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the answer is yes, and it’s sooner than you may think.
When asked at Anthropic’s first developer conference, Code with Claude, when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee would happen, Amodei confidently responded, “2026.”
Also: Anthropic’s latest Claude AI models are here – and you can try one for free today
At the same event, Anthropic unveiled its most powerful family of models yet — Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 — which can code, reason, and support agentic capabilities better than ever before. These new AI agents should unlock new opportunities for people to optimize how they work, develop products, and even build their own startups.
According to Amodei, the first industries to see this type of efficiency will be those that don’t need human institution-centric stuff to make money, or industries in which the core of the business model isn’t reliant on human interaction.
For example, he says proprietary training or dev tooling companies are examples of where this solo-preneur work, aided by AI, could be done. People just need to adopt the product, and customer service can be as simple as asking a question and having the model answer it.
The claim that the first person to build a billion-dollar company is a year away is merely a prediction. So, while it is possible that it doesn’t exactly pan out, Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram and later Artifact, says it doesn’t seem as far-fetched as people may think.
“It seems not crazy to me. I built a billion-dollar company with 13 people, and that was 13 years ago,” said Krieger in a press Q&A.
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With tools like Claude Opus, Krieger said he likely could have built Instagram with just himself and his co-founder, Kevin Systrom. Much of what they had to scale with Instagram, particularly moderation and engineering, AI could have made a significant difference.
One of the most prominent trends in the field today is AI agents — AI that can do tasks for you autonomously with little human intervention, and these agents keep becoming more capable.
Anthropic’s most advanced model — Claude Opus 4 — was built to deliver sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks. One of Anthropic’s clients, Rakuten, ran an open-source refactor running independently for seven hours of sustained performance.
Also: I let Google’s Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant
That number is especially noteworthy because it represents about a full day’s work for a human, completed by an AI agent without breaks or a drop in performance. As these technologies continue to advance, it’s easy to see how they could drive innovation and empower the next wave of startups.
“Our famously small team had to make really painful either/or decisions. We either explore adding video to the product or focus on core creativity,” said Krieger. “With AI agents, startups can now run experiments in parallel.”
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