A top Anthropic engineer warns AI agents will transform every computer-based job in America — and it will be 'painful'

• Claude Code's creator is warning that job titles across the US are set to transform. He says some will rapidly change this year.
• Anthropic's AI agent, which just received an update, is getting better at online tasks, Boris Cherny said.
• He has one tip for workers whose jobs might be affected by the coding tools.

A top Anthropic engineer said a new generation of AI agents capable of operating computers will reshape nearly every internet-based job in America.

And he said the change is coming very soon.

Boris Cherny — the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, the company best known for its Claude chatbot — recently appeared on "Lenny's Podcast," hosted by Lenny Rachitsky.

He said AI systems that can take action across workplace computer tools — like the ones Anthropic sells access to — are advancing rapidly and could soon alter 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. "In the meantime, it's going to be very disruptive. It's going to be painful for a lot of people."

Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding agent built on top of its Claude models. The company released its latest updates, called Opus 4.6, in early February.

Unlike a traditional chatbot that generates text or images, an AI agent can use digital tools — running commands, analyzing documents, messaging colleagues, completing tasks across apps, and even building websites.

Essentially, Claude Code can increasingly use a computer the way a human does — though the company recently said it has yet to reach the level of a skilled human.

"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," he said.

Cherny says his own team already relies on AI to work faster. Productivity per engineer has increased sharply since Claude Code's launch, he said. He believed the models will continue improving. (Of course, Cherny also has good reason to talk up the company's products, which it shops to enterprise companies.)

Cherny recently said in an interview with Y Combinator's "Lightcone" podcast that the job title software engineer will start to "go away" in 2026.

The broader impact remains uncertain, he warned.

"As a society, this is a conversation we have to figure out together," he told Rachitsky. "Anyone can just build software anytime."

For workers navigating the shift, his advice is direct: experiment with AI tools and learn how they function.

"Don't be scared of them," he said.