A hot potato: It feels like we're in the middle of a bragging-rights fight over which company has the most AI-written code. Google, Microsoft, Snap, and others have all talked about how much of their code is now AI-generated, but Anthropic appears to be leading the pack: its CFO said "90%-plus" of its code is written by Claude.
Speaking on an episode of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best podcast, Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao mentioned the shockingly high figure.
Rao added that Claude is being used beyond coding tasks at the company. He talked about it being almost like an assistant or digital coworker.
Rao also mentioned Claude's use in the finance department. He said the AI produces financial statements and can generate the company's monthly financial review at a point where it is 90% to 95% complete.
It's this sort of talk that brings up the inevitable question of what effect AI will have on jobs. Rao claims that because Claude is acting as a productivity "accelerant," Anthropic has actually hired a lot more people.
"That actually means that we can get a lot more done and that even as we grow the team, those people are more productive as they come up the curve on how to use Claude within our company. And I think that's starting to be true across many companies as well."
Rao argues that increased productivity gives employees more time to make important decisions and delegate monotonous, tedious tasks to AI. Maybe that's true at Anthropic, which did make Claude, after all, but the tens of thousands of people laid off from the likes of Block, Meta, Amazon, and elsewhere in the name of "streamlining" are unlikely to nod in agreement.
Boasting about the percentage of code written by AI seems to have become the new tech firm flex. Google said last month that its figure is now 75%, a sharp increase from 25% in October 2024 and 50% in late 2025.
Also read: Anthropic says Claude learned to blackmail people from "evil" AI stories online
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that between 20% and 30% of the code inside the company's repositories and some projects is now "written by software." Others claim to be even further along: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky put the figure at 60%, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said AI writes well over half of the company's code, and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said the number is "well north of half," likely closer to two-thirds.
Snap says more than 65% of its new code is generated by AI, while Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev estimated the figure at around 50%. Compass says AI produces 30% to 40% of all new code, and Fubo says about 35% of its code is now completed with AI. Chime reported one of the sharpest increases, claiming AI-assisted development jumped from 29% to 84% of code shipped in just four months.
The numbers are not always directly comparable, as some refer to new code while others to shipped code or AI-assisted work. Ultimately, though, much of the industry seems to think reaching high figures is worth the negative publicity that comes with layoffs.