Anthropic is hardly hiring any entry-level staff in technical roles anymore. According to The Decoder, the share of junior employees among new hires has fallen from 27 to 9 percent since the beginning of 2025. By August 2026, AI agents across the company were already working six times as many hours as humans.

What the numbers mean

An AI agent is a program built on a language model. It carries out tasks largely on its own and in several steps, for example writing, checking and revising code. Clearly defined tasks like these were long part of the everyday work of beginners. This is exactly where agents now seem to be taking over a large share of the work.

The context matters: the junior share describes how new hires are composed. By itself, it says nothing about how many people work at the company overall. The agents' sixfold number of hours also mainly shows how heavily the technology is used internally. It does not automatically say anything about quality or results.

Warning about a knowledge gap

Researchers warn of a "tragedy of the cognitive commons." A commons is a shared resource that nobody looks after alone, such as a pasture for everyone. Applied to the world of work, this resource is experience: every company benefits from well-trained professionals, but if each one saves money on entry-level positions, the next generation of talent is lost for everyone.

The idea behind it: experienced specialists don't fall from the sky, they grow out of junior positions. If those positions disappear, senior staff could be missing later on. The researchers do add a caveat, though: this only becomes a problem if such professionals are still needed at all. Whether that will be the case is an open question.

What readers can take away

For beginners in technical fields, it can make sense to practice working with AI tools while also building a deep understanding of the fundamentals. Companies could examine how they pass on knowledge when simple tasks are automated. The Anthropic case is a single example and not yet proof for the labor market as a whole.