Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has issued a stark warning about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, predicting that AI systems could soon handle most or all tasks performed by software engineers.
His warning hinted at future redundancy of software engineers, and asked users to master AI systems soon.
AI to perform end-to-end software engineering tasks soon
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in a discussion with Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Amodei said AI models might achieve this capability in a very short timeframe.
“I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end,” he stated.
He described a closing loop where AI takes over the full process of software development, from initial creation to completion.
Internal evidence at Anthropic points to shift
Amodei highlighted changes already visible within his own company. He noted that some engineers at Anthropic have stopped writing code manually.
“I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any codes anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it,” he explained.
This suggests a transition where human roles move towards reviewing and refining AI-generated output rather than producing code from scratch.
Uncertainty remains on full automation
Despite the bold timeline, Amodei acknowledged limits and unknowns. He pointed out that certain aspects, such as chip manufacturing and full model training, cannot yet be handled entirely by AI.
“I think there’s a lot of uncertainty,” he added, tempering the prediction with caution about what remains beyond current reach.
