Claude Code, the company’s surprisingly popular hit, is a coding tool that has captured the attention of users far beyond the software engineers it was built for. First released in February 2024 as a developer assistant, the coding tool has become increasingly sophisticated and sparked a level of excitement rarely seen since ChatGPT’s debut. Jensen Huang called it “incredible” and urged companies to adopt it for coding. A senior Google engineer said it recreated a year’s worth of work in an hour. And users without any programming background have deployed it to book theater tickets, file taxes, and even monitor tomato plants.
Even at Microsoft, which sells GitHub Copilot, Claude Code has been widely adopted internally across its major engineering teams, with even non-developers reportedly being encouraged to use it.
Anthropic’s products have long been popular with software developers, but after users pointed out that Claude Code was more of a general-purpose AI agent, Anthropic created a version of the product for non-coders. Last week, the company launched Cowork, a file management agent that is essentially a user-friendly version of the coding product. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said his team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself to do the legwork.
“It was just kind of obvious that Cowork is the next step,” Cherny told Fortune. “We just want to make it much easier for non-programmers.”
What separates Cowork from earlier general use AI tools from Anthropic is its ability to take autonomous action rather than simply provide advice. The products can access files, control browsers through the “Claude in Chrome” extension, and manipulate applications—executing tasks rather than just suggesting how to do them. For some general users, it’s the first taste of what the promise of agentic AI really is.
Many of the uses aren’t especially sexy, but they do save users hours. Cherny says he uses Cowork for project management, automatically messaging team members on Slack when they haven’t updated shared spreadsheets, and had heard of use cases including one researcher deploying it to comb through museum archives for basketry collections.
“Engineers just feel unshackled, that they don’t have to work on all the tedious stuff anymore,” Cherny told Fortune. “We’re starting to hear this for Cowork also, where people are saying all this tedious stuff—shuffling data between spreadsheets, integrating Slack and Salesforce, organizing your emails—it just does it so you can focus on the work you actually want to do.”
Enterprise first, consumer second
Despite the consumer buzz, Anthropic is positioning both products squarely in the enterprise market, where the company reportedly already leads OpenAI in adoption.
“For Anthropic, we’re an enterprise AI company,” Cherny said. “We build consumer products, but for us, really, the focus is enterprise.”
Cherny said this strategy is also guided by Anthropic’s founding mission around AI safety, which resonates with corporate customers concerned about security and compliance. In this case, the company’s roadmap with general-use products was to first develop strong coding capabilities to enable sophisticated tool use and ‘test’ products with technical customers. By providing capabilities to technical users through Claude Code before extending them to broader audiences, Cherny said the company builds on a tested foundation rather than starting from scratch with consumer tools.
Claude Code is now used by Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Salesforce, Accenture, and Snowflake, among others, according to Cherny. The product has found “a very intense product market fit across the different enterprise spaces,” he told Fortune.
Anthropic’s also seen a traffic uplift as a result of Claude Code’s viral moment. Claude’s total web audience has more than doubled since December 2024, and its daily unique visitors on desktop are up 12% globally year-to-date, according to data from Similarweb and Sensor Tower published by The Wall Street Journal.
The company is facing challenges that come with AI agents capable of autonomous action. Both products have security vulnerabilities, particularly “prompt injections” where attackers hide malicious instructions in web content to manipulate AI behavior.
To tackle this, Anthropic has implemented multiple security layers, including running Cowork in a virtual machine and recently adding deletion protection after a user accidentally removed files. A feature Cherny called “quite innovative.”
But the company does acknowledge the limitations of their approach. “Agent safety—that is, the task of securing Claude’s real-world actions—is still an active area of development in the industry,” Anthropic warned in its announcement.
The future of software engineering
With the rise of increasingly sophisticated autonomous coding tools, some are concerned that software engineer roles, especially entry-level roles, could dry up. Even within Anthropic, some engineers have stopped writing code at all, according to CEO Dario Amodei.
“I have engineers within Anthropic who say ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it,’” Amodei said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what software engineers do end-to-end.”
Tech companies argue that these tools will democratize coding, allowing those with little to no technical skills to build products by prompting AI systems in natural language. But, while it’s not definitive the two are causally linked and there are other factors impacting a jobs downturn, it’s true that open roles for entry–level software engineers have declined as the amount of code written by generative AI has ramped up.
Time will tell whether this heralds a democratization of software development or the slow erosion of a once stable profession, but by bringing autonomous AI agents out of the lab and into everyday work, Claude Code may speed up how quickly we find out.
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