Engineers in Silicon Valley has been excited about Anthropic's AI coding tool, Claude Code, for months. But lately it feels like it's reached a fever pitch.
Earlier this week I spoke to Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, to try to understand how the company is coping at the moment.
“We built the simplest thing possible,” Cherny said. “The craziest thing was that three months ago I learned that half of Anthropic's sales team uses Claude Code every week.”
AI-powered coding has evolved rapidly. From 2021 to 2024, most tools functioned as little more than autocomplete, suggesting a few lines of code as developers typed. In early 2025, startups like Cursor and Windsurf began rolling out early “agentic” coding products, which allowed developers to describe a function in plain language and leave the rest to an AI agent.
Claude Code was also launched around this time. Cherny acknowledges that early versions of Claude Code often stumbled, made mistakes, or got stuck in costly loops. Cherny says Anthropic Claude built Code for where its AI capabilities were going, rather than where they were at launch.
That bet was prescient. Several developers claim that AI coding products have reached a turning point in recent months, especially around the launch of Anthropic's latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.5.
Kian Katanforoosh, an adjunct lecturer in AI at Stanford and CEO of the startup Workera, says his company recently switched to Claude Code after testing several AI coding tools internally. Ultimately, he says, Claude Code worked better for his senior engineers than Cursor and Windsurf tools.
“The only model I can point to where I've seen an incremental improvement in coding skills recently is Claude Opus 4.5,” says Katanforoosh. “It doesn't even feel like it's coding like a human, you feel like it's figured out a better way.”
Last year, AI coding agent activity boomed. In November, Anthropic announced that Claude Code had reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue less than a year after its debut.
By the end of 2025, Claude Code's ARR had grown by at least another $100 million, according to a person familiar with the company's financials. At the time, the product accounted for about 12 percent of Anthropic's total ARR, which was about $9 billion. Although still smaller than Anthropic's business operations – which provide AI systems to entire companies – coding is one of the company's fastest-growing segments.
Anthropic also told investors that it aims to be cash flow positive by 2028 and that Claude Code could play a major role in revenue growth. The company declined to comment on its financials.
While Anthropic feels dominant in the AI coding space, the buzz around Claude Opus 4.5 seems to be boosting several companies. Cursor, which allows users to code using models from Anthropic and other AI labs, also said its coding tool reached $1 billion ARR in November. The company posted particularly strong month-over-month sales growth in December, according to a person close to the company. OpenAI, Google and xAI are also racing to claim a larger share of the AI coding market, developing their own agentic products powered by internal AI models.
Now Anthropic is looking to use Claude Code's momentum to create agents for non-coding industries. Earlier this month, the company launched Cowork, an AI agent that can manage files on a user's computer and interact with software – without any interaction with a coding terminal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
WIRED: There has been excitement about Claude Code for months. Why is it starting now?
