Anthropic's internal AI use, valued at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay

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Here's a remarkable milestone in the AI revolution: Anthropic now spends more on internal AI usage than it does paying employees.

The company revealed this in its IPO filing. In April, the value of Claude AI used internally, calculated at prices Anthropic charges customers, exceeded its monthly employee compensation costs, excluding stock awards.

By September, that internal AI usage had surged more than 250-fold since January.

There's an important distinction here. Anthropic isn't actually spending more cash on AI than salaries. It's valuing its internal AI consumption at retail prices.

Still, this feels like a watershed moment for the tech industry.

In March, I wrote about a new trend: Tech companies are starting to treat AI tokens (the main way to measure usage) as a fourth component of employee compensation, alongside salary, bonuses, and stock awards.

Anthropic's numbers show why. More than 90% of the code added to its software in September was written by Claude. Meanwhile, revenue has grown vastly faster than headcount.

For decades, talented humans were the most valuable resource in Silicon Valley. Now AI is challenging that assumption.

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