How Claude Code Is Reshaping Software—and Anthropic

Engineers in Silicon Valley are raving about Anthropic's AI coding tools, Claude Codefor months. But recently the buzz feels like it has reached a fever pitch.

Earlier this week, I sat down with Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, to try to understand how the company meets this moment.

“We built the simplest thing possible,” Cherny said. “The craziest thing was learning three months ago that half the sales team at Anthropic uses Claude Code every week.”

AI-powered coding has evolved rapidly. From 2021 to 2024, most tools no longer functioned as autocomplete, suggesting a few lines of code as developers typed. By early 2025, startups like Cursor and Windsurf began rolling out early “agentic” coding products, which allow developers to describe a function in plain language and leave the rest to an AI agent.

Claude Code launched around this time as well. Cherny acknowledges that early versions of Claude Code often stumbled, made mistakes or got stuck in costly loops. Cherny says Anthropic built Claude Code for where AI capabilities were headed, rather than where they were at launch.

That bet was prudent. Several developers claim that AI coding products achieve a inflection point in recent months, especially since the launch of Anthropic's latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.5.

Kian Katanforoosh, an adjunct lecturer on AI at Stanford and the CEO of the startup Workera, says his company recently switched to Claude Code after testing several AI coding tools internally. In the end, he says, Claude Code worked better for his senior engineers than tools from Cursor and Windsurf.

“The only model I can point to where I've seen a step function improvement in coding ability recently is Claude Opus 4.5,” says Katanforoosh. “It doesn't even feel like it's coding like a human, you feel like it figured out a better way.”

Last year, the company took on AI coding agents. In November, Anthropic announced that Claude Code had reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, less than a year after its debut.

By the end of 2025, Claude Code's ARR had grown by at least another $100 million, according to a person familiar with the company's financial data. At the time, the product accounted for about 12 percent of Anthropic's total ARR, which stood at about $9 billion. Although it's still smaller than Anthropic's enterprise business — which provides AI systems to entire businesses — coding is one of the company's fastest-growing segments.

Anthropic has also told investors that it aims to be cash flow positive by 2028 and that Claude Code could play a key role in its revenue growth. The company declined to comment on its finances.

While Anthropic feels dominant in AI coding, the buzz around Claude Opus 4.5 seems to be lifting several companies. Cursor, which lets users code with models from Anthropic and other AI labs, also said its coding tool hit $1 billion in ARR in November. In December, the company posted particularly strong month-over-month revenue growth, according to a person close to the company. OpenAI, Google and xAI are also racing to claim a larger share of the AI ​​coding market, developing their own agent products powered by proprietary AI models.

Now Anthropic is trying to use Claude Code's momentum to create agents for non-coding sectors. Earlier this month, the company launched Cowork, an AI agent that can manage files on a user's computer and interact with software — without requiring interaction with a coding terminal.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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