In the latest Supercompanies newsletter from Greg and Taylor (of Section AI), they dig into Anthropic’s latest employment report that could be the playbook for the companies of the future. Currently, each Anthropic employee is worth $6.6M USD in revenue, compared to about $2.5M at Google and Meta. A top SG bank’s revenue per employee is about $470K.
Here are excerpts from the newsletter that will make you rethink how your company is run, or how your job needs to transform. Do read the actual newsletter, the link is in the comments:
🔵 Compute is the new headcount.
“When a team at Anthropic needs more capacity, the first answer is more inference, and employees are discouraged from hiring when Claude can do the work. Most companies still plan the other way around. “
🔵 “Human in the loop” is on its way out.
“Once compute is doing most of the work, people become the slowest part of the system… Anthropic’s answer is to invest in harnesses and evals so fewer things need a person’s sign-off, and the quality data so far says it works.”
🔵 Engineers will make the product calls.
“PMs will add more of a human bottleneck to AI-powered engineering, so it makes more sense to put more product responsibility onto the coders.”
🔵 Moving at the speed of F1.
“Product releases are at break-neck speed – one estimate earlier this year was 74 releases in 52 days (or a release every 18 hours, according to another observer).”
🔵 Everyone will build and manage agents.
“Companies like Goldman Sachs are pulling back Claude Code access from everyone except engineers – probably because they never trained their people to build agents effectively and then got freaked out about cost.”
🔵 Judgment is the new superpower.
“Anthropic’s hiring now puts more weight on judgment and autonomy than on domain expertise, and it’s hiring far fewer junior employees (from 27% to 9% of hires).”
🔵 Insane talent density.
“So at your company, you just need a couple hundred really smart people – and then combine them with the best supporting cast you can find.”
Ian’s thoughts: I think most company bosses cannot wrap their heads around these concepts and their businesses will be displaced in the next decade by the AI-powered supercompanies.
P.S. Of course, Profit Per Employee is a different matter. Anthropic’s PPE is negative $19M per employee, largely due to the value of their convertible notes, or positive $183k based on actualoperating profit.
Anthropic’s employment report: https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic
Greg and Taylor’s Supercompanies newsletter on the Anthropic employment report: https://supercompanies.substack.com/p/biggest-con-job-or-supercompany-playbook