Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that artificial intelligence could handle most, and possibly all, software engineering work within six to 12 months.
Amodei made the prediction in January 2026 during a discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He said some Anthropic engineers already rely on AI models to write their code, leaving them to edit the output and handle other parts of the work.
I have engineers within Anthropic who say I do not write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it.
Amodei then gave his timeline for how quickly the technology could advance.
We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end to end.
He also warned that the timeline remains uncertain because chip production and model training still limit how quickly AI can improve itself.
Anthropic’s own data shows how quickly its coding capabilities have advanced.
The company says Claude authored more than 80% of the code it merged into its codebase as of May 2026.
Meanwhile, the typical engineer merged eight times as much code per day in the second quarter of 2026 as engineers did in 2024.
However, Amodei’s prediction does not necessarily mean software engineers will disappear within months.
In a later discussion, he distinguished between AI performing most engineering tasks and companies needing far fewer engineers, saying those represent different stages of automation.
The prediction has therefore become less about whether AI can write code and more about how quickly it could take over the wider work currently performed by software engineers.