Anthropic partners with CodePath to train next generation of coders using Claude Code

The Surprise Hit That Made Anthropic Into an AI Juggernaut

Even Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei was surprised by the initial level of enthusiasm for what became the startup's next breakthrough product. For months, engineers across the company flocked to an internal AI coding tool called Claude Code that was originally developed as a side project by Boris Cherny, then an employee in an experimental division of Anthropic that he compares to Bell Labs. "I remember Dario asking, like, 'Hey, are you forcing engineers to use this? Why is everyone using it?'" Cherny recalled in a recent interview. Actually, Cherny explained, all he had to do was give his co-workers access "and everyone voted with their feet." It was a sign of things to come. Claude Code, released publicly a year ago this month, quickly took off with software developers around the world, cementing Anthropic as a leader in a lucrative, emerging market for so-called vibe coding products. Other applications like Microsoft Copilot and Cursor were already popular with this cohort thanks to their approachable designs, but Claude Code promised to write and debug code more autonomously. Suddenly, rivals like OpenAI had to race to catch up to Anthropic, rather than the other way around. Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue in the first six months after its release and has since grown to $2.5 billion, the company said. Once used primarily by AI-forward startups, Claude Code has gained traction with engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies and even among hobbyists lacking technical skills who are interested in building their own apps. It's been used for everything from growing a tomato plant to helping plan the route of a NASA Mars rover. On social media, users describe themselves as "Claude-pilled," or Claude-obsessed. If ChatGPT's release three-plus years ago showed the potential for generative AI to spit out clever chunks of text, Claude Code's launch demonstrated how AI can actually perform a portion of a person's job with limited intervention. Anthropic said some users are now letting Claude Code work autonomously on tasks for more than 45 minutes at a time before stopping it. On average, Claude Code users spend 20 hours a week working with the product. The success of Claude Code is both a testament to AI's utility in the workplace and a reminder of how hard it can be to predict the ways AI will be used in the real world. Its rapid adoption has revived concerns about job loss, including from Amodei, as well as fears about what happens when autonomous AI tools go awry. (Anthropic says it has staffers working to understand and address both issues.) More imminently, however, the challenge for Anthropic and its peers is proving they can find traction with AI agents for other professions as they have with coders, a group that's quicker to adopt cutting-edge technology. "There are a few areas where these models are actually really getting to the point where they can really change how work gets done," said Kate Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic. "Code happened to be the first one." Following Claude Code's runaway success, Anthropic has been pushing to expand its AI offerings for health care, finance and legal services. Those efforts have helped trigger a market meltdown in recent weeks as investors worry that certain legacy software providers may be rendered obsolete by newer AI advances. On Friday, cybersecurity stocks were the latest to slip after Anthropic unveiled new features in Claude Code to help companies spot security vulnerabilities in their software. "You're seeing a reaction in large part to just how fast the industry is moving and how quickly the technology is getting better and better," Jensen said before the security announcement. Though some of the market swing news can be "all-consuming" at times, she said it's important to remember that legacy software companies can benefit from building on top of Anthropic's technology. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. For now, much of Anthropic's traction remains in the realm of coding. At Spotify, roughly two-thirds of the staff have opted in to using Claude Code, outpacing the adoption of any similar product, according to Niklas Gustavsson, the company's chief architect and vice president of engineering. Spotify has also built its own internal tool called Honk that lets staff talk to Claude Code on Slack to make changes to the music streaming app's code base. "For many of us, including myself, it was a bit of a mental jump," said Gustavsson, who had at least four different Claude Code agents running in the background on his laptop during the interview. "I've been in this industry for 30 years now, and the code has always been very front and center when I'm working with it. Claude Code has completely inverted that." Gustavsson said it's hard to capture the gains from AI coding tools in any one metric but several of Spotify's internal productivity measurements have gone up since using Claude Code. Anthropic said its engineers' productivity has grown 200%, by one measure, as Claude Code use increased over the past six months. Its sales teams, data analysts and product managers are using it, too. Cherny, who is now head of Claude Code, feels this change in his day-to-day work. He focuses less on the boring tasks like manually debugging code, and more on strategy and talking to customers to get feedback. "We're starting to see this world where a customer complains about something and it's fixed in a matter of minutes," he said. "It doesn't take weeks anymore. This is just very exciting for me."

Anthropic pushes Claude into CodePath AI curriculum

By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to program Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty. The project aims to Claude-ify more than 20,000 students at community colleges, state schools, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). According to Anthropic, more than 40 percent of CodePath students come from families earning less than $50,000 a year, a nod to the less privileged who may not be able to afford college without financial assistance. "We now have the technology to teach in two years what used to take four," said Michael Ellison, co-founder and CEO of CodePath, in a statement. "But speed for some and not others just widens inequality. Partnering with Anthropic means our students learn to build with Claude from day one, at institutions that have historically been overlooked. This results in better outcomes for our students and a fundamentally different answer to who gets to shape the AI economy." We question whether access to Claude will empower economically disadvantaged students to "shape the AI economy." Entering the workforce with some knowledge of Claude should enable participation in the AI economy - certainly a win if the Claude-deprived find jobs scarce. But shaping the AI economy remains the privilege of corporations and billionaires, of those throwing cash at computing infrastructure, politicians, and public relations. CodePath plans to integrate Claude into various programming courses to give students experience building projects with AI tools and contributing to open source projects - at least the ones that allow AI-generated code submissions. CodePath students have been pilot testing Claude Code, to good effect, it's claimed. Anthropic reports that Laney Hood, CodePath student and computer science major at Texas Tech University, had nice things to say about its software. "Claude Code was instrumental in my learning process, especially since I came into the project with very little experience in the programming languages used in the repository [including TypeScript and Node.js]," said Hood. At the start of the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, companies like Apple and Microsoft worked to get their products into the hands of students, knowing that early familiarity encourages customer retention. As web and cloud services began to overshadow traditional operating systems as computing gatekeepers, Google adopted a similar strategy by pushing its Chromebook hardware into schools. More recently, Meta has followed suit, with a mixed and virtual reality offering called Meta for Education. And now, as AI companies strive to make their models chokepoints for computing services, they too are wooing students in the hope of building lasting brands. OpenAI, last year, announced that it had joined the American Federation of Teachers to help launch the National Academy for AI Instruction, alongside Anthropic and Microsoft. And before that, OpenAI debuted ChatGPT Edu. Meta, meanwhile, has been trying to get its Llama model family into schools through a partnership with Blended Labs. Anthropic insists that its tie-up with CodePath isn't just about modernizing the curriculum of computer science. The AI biz says it expects to work with CodePath on public research into the way that AI is changing education and economic opportunities. Those opportunities - specifically programming jobs - have declined significantly since 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Nonetheless, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says, "Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 15 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average [of 3 percent] for all occupations." There is already ample research on the impact that AI is having on computer science education. Recent papers on the subject tend to be a mixed bag, finding AI assistance can be helpful if properly administered, so long as there's compensation for the learning lost by offloading cognitive tasks. ®

Anthropic Fast-Tracks Next Generation of Coders Into Claude Ecosystem | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The AI startup is collaborating with CodePath, a provider of collegiate computer science training, to integrate Claude into CodePath's courses and redesign the organization's coding curriculum to reflect how AI is reshaping software development, Anthropic said in a Friday (Feb. 13) press release. CodePath aims to improve access to industry-vetted courses and career networks for its students, 40% of whom come from families earning less than $50,000 a year, according to the release. "Partnering with Anthropic means our students learn to build with Claude from day one, at institutions that have historically been overlooked," CodePath Co-founder and CEO Michael Ellison said in the release. "This results in better outcomes for our students and a fundamentally different answer to who gets to shape the AI economy." Anthropic said in its release: "The tools changing how software is built shouldn't only be available to students at well-resourced universities. With CodePath, they won't be." PYMNTS reported in June that AI coding assistants enable smaller teams to do tasks that would otherwise cost a lot more, as well as cutting development time for businesses to bring products to market faster. Based on large language models, these tools generate code, fix bugs and perform other tasks. The ability of AI coding tools to enable faster and cheaper software development also drove a selloff of software shares that impacted the world's largest software businesses. When Anthropic announced Thursday (Feb. 12) that it raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that valued the company at $380 billion, it attributed the investors' interest in part to the company's strength in enterprise AI and coding. The firm said its agentic coding tool Claude Code was made available to the general public in May and now has run-rate revenue of $2.5 billion. It added that it will use the new funding to support continued frontier research, product development and infrastructure expansions.