Engineers in Silicon Valley have been raving about Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, for months. But recently, the buzz feels as if it’s reached a fever pitch.
Earlier this week, I sat down with Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, to try to understand how the company is meeting this moment.
“We built the simplest possible thing,” said Cherny. “The craziest thing was learning three months ago that half of the sales team at Anthropic uses Claude Code every week.”
AI-powered coding has evolved quickly. From 2021 to 2024, most tools functioned as little more than autocomplete, suggesting a few lines of code as developers typed. By early 2025, startups like Cursor and Windsurf began rolling out early “agentic” coding products, which let developers describe a feature in plain language and leave the rest up to an AI agent.
Claude Code launched around this time too. Cherny acknowledges that early versions of Claude Code often stumbled, making errors or getting stuck in costly loops. Cherny says Anthropic built Claude Code for where AI capabilities were headed, rather than where they were at launch.
That bet was prescient. Several developers claim AI coding products reached an inflection point in recent months, particularly around the launch of Anthropic’s latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.5.
Kian Katanforoosh, an adjunct lecturer on AI at Stanford and the CEO of the startup Workera, says his company recently switched over to Claude Code after testing several AI coding tools internally. Ultimately, he says, Claude Code worked better for his senior engineers than tools from Cursor and Windsurf.
“The only model I can point to where I saw a step-function improvement in coding abilities recently has been Claude Opus 4.5,” says Katanforoosh. “It doesn’t even feel like it’s coding like a human, you sort of feel like it has figured out a better way.”
Last year, the business of AI coding agents took off. In November, Anthropic announced that Claude Code had reached $1 billion in annualized 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 roughly 12 percent of Anthropic’s total ARR, which stood around $9 billion. While still smaller than Anthropic’s enterprise business—which supplies AI systems to entire corporations—coding is one of the company’s fastest-growing segments.
Anthropic has also told investors it aims to be cash-flow positive by 2028 and that Claude Code could play an important role in its revenue growth. The company declined to comment on its finances.
While Anthropic feels dominant in AI coding, the buzz around Claude Opus 4.5 appears to be lifting several companies. Cursor, which lets users code using models from Anthropic and other AI labs, also said its coding tool reached $1 billion in ARR in November. In December, the company posted particularly strong month-over-month revenue growth, 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 agentic products of their own powered by in-house AI models.
Now, Anthropic is trying to use Claude Code’s momentum to create agents for non-coding sectors. Earlier this month, the company launched Cowork, an AI agent that can manage files on a user’s computer and interact with software—without requiring any interaction with a coding terminal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
WIRED: There’s been excitement around Claude Code for months. Why is it taking off now?
