Anthropic is hiring fewer junior staff for technical roles. According to an internal study by the AI company, the junior share in technical departments fell from 21 to 14 percent since early 2025. Among new hires, it dropped from 27 to 9 percent, and among open positions to 6 percent. The decline was especially sharp from December 2025 onward. The Decoder and Martin Cid Magazine both report these figures from Anthropic's report.
Background
Anthropic attributes the decline to the growing capability of its AI agents. According to the study, these agents logged six times as many work hours as human employees by August 2026, and a ratio of 19:1 in research departments. Tasks such as writing code and finding bugs are increasingly handed to Claude. Junior hiring fell most in roles where Claude handles the most complex work. Non-technical departments remained mostly stable.
According to Anthropic, productivity rose across all departments: engineers shipped 5.1 times as many code commits, the legal team processed 3.1 times as many contracts, and sales closed 1.7 times as many deals.
Assessment
The study itself acknowledges that Anthropic, as an extremely AI-heavy software company, is a special case. According to the company, the results cannot readily be transferred to the broader economy; rapid growth and voluntary adoption of AI tools could also skew the numbers. The sources note that no measurable productivity gain from AI has so far appeared in the wider economy.
Researcher Nolan Lovett of the NATO Special Operations University describes a "tragedy of the cognitive commons" in a paper: when companies replace entry-level positions with AI, they benefit in the short term while the shortage of experienced professionals hits everyone later. Lovett expects the full effects only between 2030 and 2045. For companies in Germany, this could mean that staffing and training plans need rethinking if similar developments occur. Whether that happens remains open according to the sources, and the data comes from a single company.
Sources
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