“Something like over 70 percent of [Anthropic’s] pull requests are now Claude code written,” Krieger told me. As for what those engineers are doing with the extra time, Krieger said they’re orchestrating the Claude codebase and, of course, attending meetings. “It really becomes apparent how much else is in the software engineering role,” he noted.
The pair fiddled with Voss water bottles and answered an array of questions from the press about an upcoming compute cluster with Amazon (Amodei says “parts of that cluster are already being used for research,”) and the displacement of workers due to AI (“I don’t think you can offload your company strategy to something like that,” Krieger said).
We’d been told by spokespeople that we weren’t allowed to ask questions about policy and regulation, but Amodei offered some unprompted insight into his views on a controversial provision in President Trump’s megabill that would ban state-level AI regulation for ten years: “If you’re driving the car, it’s one thing to say ‘we don’t have to drive with the steering wheel now.’ It’s another thing to say ‘we’re going to rip out the steering wheel and we can’t put it back in for 10 years,’” Amodei said.
What does Amodei think about the most? He says the race to the bottom, where safety measures are cut in order to compete in the AI race.
“The absolute puzzle of running Anthropic is that we somehow have to find a way to do both,” Amodei said, meaning the company has to compete and deploy AI safely. “You might have heard this stereotype that, ‘Oh, the companies that are the safest, they take the longest to do the safety testing. They’re the slowest.’ That is not what we found at all.”
