Why AI Disrupts Software First

A few days ago, when decoding Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s memo to his company about layoffs and artificial intelligence, I said that “this is not just about Microsoft, but pretty much every software company will be hit hard by this wave of transformation.” The point I was making in the piece was that AI is coming, and the first domino to fall will be software.

I was watching this excellent conversation between Stripe co-founder John Collison and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, where the latter eloquently outlines non-financial reasons as to why the software sector is getting (and will keep getting) disrupted by AI. Anthropic is one of the fastest-growing businesses — with over $4 billion in annual recurring revenue — and one of the key cornerstones of its growth is Claude Code. “We’ve actually managed to make Claude good in a way that’s relevant to what people actually use,” Amodei said in the conversation.

“The people who write code are very socially and technically adjacent to the folks who develop AI models, and so the diffusion is very fast,” Amodei told Collison. “They’re also the kind of people who are early adopters, who are used to new technology.”

“The big growth in code, you know, I would say the biggest cause of that is just that the people doing it and the startups devoted to it are fast adopters who understand the technology super well,” Amodei said.

“I think code is maybe an early indicator,” he said, viewing coding/software as “an early indicator, like a premonition of what’s going to happen everywhere else.” Amodei argued that traditional enterprises are slower to change. Large entities such as banks, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical firms have organizational inertia, but in time they will adapt. This vision of widespread AI adoption fuels Amodei’s ambition. He dreams of making Anthropic into a “one-stop shop for AI,” adding, “We think of ourselves as a platform company first.” 

“One of the fundamental experiences and uncertainties of working at or running something like Anthropic is you kind of don’t know. You make this exponential projection. It sounds crazy. It might be crazy. But also, it might not be crazy because that trend line has followed before.”

Of all Amodei’s recent interviews, this conversation clearly outlines where we stand with AI and what the long-termvision is for Anthropic, the company behind Claude and OpenAI’s main competitor. It’s worth watching!

August 6, 2025. San Francisco