It’s been a good few weeks for Anthropic. The lab is reportedly planning a $10 billion fundraising that would value the company at $350 billion, its CEO caused headlines in Davos by criticizing the White House, and it’s also having a viral product launch that most AI labs can only dream of.
Claude Code, the company’s surprisingly popular hit, is a coding tool that has captured the attention of users far beyond the software engineers it was built for. First released in February 2024 as a developer assistant, the coding tool has become increasingly sophisticated and sparked a level of excitement rarely seen since ChatGPT’s debut. Jensen Huang called it “incredible” and urged companies to adopt it for coding. A senior Google engineer said it recreated a year’s worth of work in an hour. And users without any programming background have deployed it to book theater tickets, file taxes, and even monitor tomato plants.
Even at Microsoft, which sells GitHub Copilot, Claude Code has been widely adopted internally across its major engineering teams, with even non-developers reportedly being encouraged to use it.
Anthropic’s products have long been popular with software developers, but after users pointed out that Claude Code was more of a general-purpose AI agent, Anthropic created a version of the product for non-coders. Last week, the company launched Cowork, a file management agent that is essentially a user-friendly version of the coding product. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said his team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself to do the legwork.
