Anthropic Engineer Warns AI Agents Will Upend White-Collar Work, With Software Engineering Roles at Risk From This Year

Anthropic is accelerating the development of AI agents such as Claude Code, enabling systems to independently break down tasks and write and review code. These tools are moving beyond question-and-answer assistance to performing work themselves. They could reshape nearly every computer-based white-collar job in the United States, with software development especially exposed because its workflows are highly digitized.

Boris Cherny, an Anthropic principal engineer who leads Claude Code, recently said AI agents had sharply increased the productivity of teams internally, with some engineers no longer writing code themselves. He predicted that the title of “software engineer” could begin gradually disappearing in 2026 and urged workers to start using AI tools immediately to understand their capabilities and limitations.