The CEO of a leading AI startup says that AI could soon take over a key component of software engineering jobs: coding.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this week that AI will write 90% of the code for software engineers within the next three to six months and every line of code within the next year.
“On the jobs side of this, I do have a fair amount of concern,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday, per Business Insider. “In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”
How much of a software engineer’s job is coding? It varies based on the role, but some software developers on Reddit estimate that about half of their job or more consists of writing code.
Amodei reassured listeners that software developers would still have jobs — for now. Humans are needed now to give AI the design features and limitations it needs to write code, he said, but over time, AI will be able to take over those tasks, too.
Eventually, humanity will reach a moment where AI can do everything humans can do, Amodei predicted.
“I think that will happen in every industry,” he stated.
Dario Amodei. Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Amodei’s comments align with a statement made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year. Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in an interview in January that Meta and other big tech companies were working on developing AI to function as midlevel engineers, write code and eventually replace some human engineers. The median yearly pay at Meta last year was $379,000. Meta plans to invest $60 to $65 billion in AI this year, an increase from $38 to $40 billion in 2024.
In the interview, Zuckerberg disclosed that Meta is racing towards the point where AI writes “a lot” of the code within its apps.
Related: Meta Is Building AI That Can Write Code Like a Mid-Level Engineer, According to Mark Zuckerberg
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion earlier this month, valuing the company at $61.5 billion. It’s backed by Google, which has a 14% stake, and Amazon. Amodei co-founded the AI startup in 2021 after leaving ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to focus on developing AI with a greater emphasis on safety. He started Anthropic with six other former OpenAI employees.
The startup is known for its AI chatbot Claude, which has quickly become the chatbot most chosen by AI insiders for everything from health coaching to therapy, per a December New York Times report.