Anthropic engineer who created Claude Code says AI will take over most internet-based jobs — ‘It will be painful’

The US is going to see an AI revolution very soon, with a top Anthropic engineer predicting that a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents will take over nearly every internet-based job in the country.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said in a recent podcast that new-age AI chatbots will be able to operate computers, and it will change the job landscape in the US.

Cherny was talking on Lenny's Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, which aired on 19 February, when he made the comments.

The top Anthropic engineer said AI systems like the ones sold by Anthropic can take action across workplace computer tools. They could soon take on multiple roles, altering responsibilities for software engineers, product managers, designers, and other knowledge workers.

“It's going to expand to pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer,” Cherny said during the podcast.

He called the imminent disruption painful for many people.

“In the meantime, it's going to be very disruptive. It's going to be painful for a lot of people,” he said.

What Boris Cherny said about AI's impact

Cherny is credited with the building of Claude Code. The San Francisco-based lab, backed by Amazon.com and Alphabet's Google, launched its Claude Opus 4.6 model in February, an AI coding agent that created jitters in the stock market and caused a sharp plunge in tech stocks.

The new AI can work on tasks for longer and more reliably, while showing gains related to coding and finance, Anthropic said.

Unlike traditional AI chatbots that can generate texts and images, an AI agent like the one Anthropic released can run commands, analyse documents, message colleagues, complete tasks across apps, and even build websites.

This means that Claude Code can rapidly and increasingly do what a human does on a computer, even as the company recently said there was still time till it actually gets capable of doing what skilled humans do.

“It's the thing that I think brings agentic AI to people that haven't really used it before, and people are starting to just get a sense of it for the first time,” Cherny said.

The Claude Code creator said his team now relies on AI to work faster, with productivity per engineer rising since the launch of the new AI tool. He also said that he believed that the models would only get better.

In another interview with Y Combinator's Lightcone podcast on 17 February, Cherny said that the title of software engineer will start to “go away” by 2026.

He warned that the broader impact of this remains uncertain.

As a society, this is a conversation we have to figure out together," he told Rachitsky.

“Anyone can just build software anytime,” the Anthropic engineer added.

He also had some advice for workers navigating the shift in how their jobs are executed — “experiment with AI tools and learn how they function.”

“Don't be scared of them,” he said.

Cherny's comments come amid a wave of layoffs across multiple tech roles and companies across the world.