Anthropic CEO Predicts First Billion-Dollar Company with One Employee by 2026, Powered by AI

First $1B business with one human employee will happen in 2026, says Anthropic CEO

AI can perform tasks such as writing, coding, reasoning, and researching with great accuracy -- all tasks that are key to starting your own company. That begs the question: Can AI help people start their very own billion-dollar business? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the answer is yes, and it's sooner than you may think. When asked at Anthropic's first developer conference, Code with Claude, when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee would happen, Amodei confidently responded, "2026." Also: Anthropic's latest Claude AI models are here - and you can try one for free today At the same event, Anthropic unveiled its most powerful family of models yet -- Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 -- which can code, reason, and support agentic capabilities better than ever before. These new AI agents should unlock new opportunities for people to optimize how they work, develop products, and even build their own startups. According to Amodei, the first industries to see this type of efficiency will be those that don't need human institution-centric stuff to make money, or industries in which the core of the business model isn't reliant on human interaction. For example, he says proprietary training or dev tooling companies are examples of where this solo-preneur work, aided by AI, could be done. People just need to adopt the product, and customer service can be as simple as asking a question and having the model answer it. The claim that the first person to build a billion-dollar company is a year away is merely a prediction. So, while it is possible that it doesn't exactly pan out, Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram and later Artifact, says it doesn't seem as far-fetched as people may think. "It seems not crazy to me. I built a billion-dollar company with 13 people, and that was 13 years ago," said Krieger in a press Q&A. Also: Google made an AI content detector - join the waitlist to try it With tools like Claude Opus, Krieger said he likely could have built Instagram with just himself and his co-founder, Kevin Systrom. Much of what they had to scale with Instagram, particularly moderation and engineering, AI could have made a significant difference. One of the most prominent trends in the field today is AI agents -- AI that can do tasks for you autonomously with little human intervention, and these agents keep becoming more capable. Anthropic's most advanced model -- Claude Opus 4 -- was built to deliver sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks. One of Anthropic's clients, Rakuten, ran an open-source refactor running independently for seven hours of sustained performance. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant That number is especially noteworthy because it represents about a full day's work for a human, completed by an AI agent without breaks or a drop in performance. As these technologies continue to advance, it's easy to see how they could drive innovation and empower the next wave of startups. "Our famously small team had to make really painful either/or decisions. We either explore adding video to the product or focus on core creativity," said Krieger. "With AI agents, startups can now run experiments in parallel." To see if the Anthropic CEO's prediction pans out and to keep track of the latest AI news, subscribe to ZDNET's free Tech Today newsletter.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Predicts the First Billion-Dollar Solopreneur by 2026

Dario Amodei, the cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, the rapidly-growing AI company behind the Claude family of AI models, predicts that a billion-dollar company staffed by a single employee could emerge in 2026 -- all because of AI. During a Q&A session at Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference, held in San Francisco, Amodei said that he expects new AI models will enable single-person businesses to flourish as they never have before. When asked by Anthropic chief product officer (and Instagram cofounder) Mike Krieger if a billion-dollar business could be created by a single person using AI, Amodei said that it would certainly happen, as soon as next year. At a later session in which Amodei and Krieger answered questions from the press, Amodei slightly walked back that prediction, saying there's probably more like a 70 to 80 percent chance of it happening. Still, he expanded on which industry that billion-dollar company could disrupt. "I think it'll be in an area where you don't need a lot of human institution-centric stuff to make money," Amodei said. His first guess? Proprietary trading, a process of investing in which a financial institution trades its own money rather than trading client funds. He also said that a single-person company creating tools for software developers could rapidly grow by deeply integrating AI. Businesses that don't require many salespeople and can automate customer service are prime candidates.

Jeff Bezos-Backed Anthropic's CEO Says The First Billion Dollar Company Staffed By One Person Will Appear Next Year -- Hallucinations Unlikely To Delay Lean Startups - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei thinks that the first billion-dollar company staffed by exactly one human will appear as early as 2026. What Happened: At the Anthropic's Code with Claude developer summit, Amodei was specifically asked when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee would happen, to which he confidently responded, "2026." The answer intrigued a crowd of founders, betting that large-language-model agents can replace whole departments. Amodei's one-person-unicorn claim landed moments after he unveiled Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the firm's most powerful models yet. Anthropic, a startup backed by both Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL and Amazon AMZN, says Opus 4 can sustain multi-hour coding sprints, reason across sprawling research briefs and even beat vintage Pokémon games. See also: Marvel Delays Robert Downey Jr. Starrer 'Avengers: Doomsday' And 'Secret Wars' To December 2026, But Disney Has A Summer Blockbuster In Store Amodei also shrugged off concerns that hallucinations will derail lean startups, telling reporters the latest Claude family "probably hallucinate less than humans, but they hallucinate in more surprising ways," responding to a query by TechCrunch. Still, according to a report by WIRED, Anthropic classed Opus 4 as an ASL-3 safety-level model and said it cut reward hacking behavior by 65 percent versus earlier releases, acknowledging the risks of handing so much autonomy to software. Why It Matters: If Amodei is right, revenue-per-employee ratios could dwarf anything seen in the dot-com or mobile eras, upending how investors value headcount. The Anthropic CEO has already warned his own staff that AI will "change how they work" long before it replaces them, claims Bloomberg, mirroring the disruption he predicts for the wider labor market. Amodei's forecast aligns with moves by rivals: OpenAI's Operator agent promises "hands-free" workflows, while Google just put its Gemini 2.5 Pro model inside Chrome for end-to-end task automation. Venture backers see these rollouts as confirmation that an economy of 'agents' is around the corner. Photo Courtesy: Gorodenkoff on Shutterstock.com Read next: Microsoft Executive Says Companies Might Be Naming 'AI Chiefs' But They Risk Losing Momentum In The Artificial Intelligence Age If They Rely On Individuals AMZNAmazon.com Inc$200.36-1.35%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum64.56Growth97.09Quality66.97Value50.17Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewGOOGAlphabet Inc$169.29-1.56%GOOGLAlphabet Inc$168.13-1.60%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs