‘An army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention’: Anthropic calls human attention the bottleneck in the botsitting world to come

Anthropic just released a study of its own workforce that offers one of the earliest looks at what an AI-dominated company of the future might look like—and spoiler alert, it includes babysitting a whole lot of bots.

AI agents are now moving so fast that 80% of the elapsed time in Claude sessions was due to the agents waiting on a human’s input, Anthropic’s report found.

“This acceleration makes human attention the bottleneck for agent output,” the report read.

Instead of actively doing the work themselves, even non-supervisor employees are increasingly acting like managers to multiple AI agents that complete tasks but also require direct attention at times.

One employee described the experience of bot management as “an army of Claudes, with every one asking for my attention.” That bottleneck is the flip side of a big jump in output.

Employees are producing more and moving faster, the company found.

AI agents collectively surpassed human working hours for the first time in March and by August, AI agent hours worked outnumbered the hours worked by humans six to one.

Software engineers’ code commits have also increased five times over the past six months.

And even non-technical employees have personal agents monitoring their email and calendars, sending to-do lists compiled from messages, and briefing them on the purpose of their upcoming meetings.

These changes have taken some manual labor off employees’ plates, but they’ve also transformed what the workday looks like.

Managing agents is becoming a job in itself.

The share of employees’ interactive Claude sessions devoted to this kind of “meta-work” rose from 10% to 22%, according to the report.

Even for non-technical employees, reading everything their Claude agents produce would take up about half their work week.

And private work, done in unlogged meetings and direct messages, is “invisible, confusing and discouraged in an AI-heavy workplace,” the report said.