Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.
"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.
"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.
Amodei, who used to work at OpenAI, cofounded Anthropic in 2021. The company has received billions of dollars in funding from tech giants such as Google and Amazon.
This isn't the first time Amodei has spoken publicly about the seismic impact AI could have on the world.
Last month, Amodei said in an interview with The New York Times that people still weren't recognizing the effect AI could have on their lives and livelihoods.
"I think people will wake up to both the risks and the benefits to a much more extreme extent than they will before over the next two years," Amodei said in an interview on the Times' "Hard Fork" podcast that aired on February 28.
Representatives for Amodei at Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
To be sure, Amodei isn't the only one who has recognized AI's ability to displace software developers.
Garry Tan, the president and CEO of the startup incubator Y Combinator, said in an X post on March 5 that one-quarter of the founders in the company's 2025 winter batch were relying heavily on AI to code their software.
"For 25% of the Winter 2025 batch, 95% of lines of code are LLM generated. That's not a typo," Tan wrote.
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said last year that she expected AI to impact about 40% of global jobs.
"Roughly half the exposed jobs may benefit from AI integration, enhancing productivity. For the other half, AI applications may execute key tasks currently performed by humans, which could lower labor demand, leading to lower wages and reduced hiring," Georgieva wrote in a blog post in January 2024.
"In the most extreme cases," she added, "some of these jobs may disappear."
