Anthropic says AI Claude now writes over 80% of its production code, boosting output eightfold

Anthropic reported that in the second quarter of 2026 its engineers merged roughly eight times as much code as in 2024, with more than 80% of the lines written by its own AI system, Claude. The company noted that Claude’s success rate on open‑ended coding tasks rose from about 26% to 76%, and that at least one engineer went five months without manually writing any code, relying entirely on the AI.

Separately, Anthropic disclosed that its compute spending in 2026—about $10 billion for inference and training—was roughly 2.3 times its payroll, amounting to around $2 million in compute cost per employee for its roughly 5,000 staff. This means AI‑related expenses represent about 40% of a senior engineer’s total compensation, a ratio the firm describes as “almost certainly overstated” as a vanity metric but indicative of a cost structure where infrastructure dominates payroll.