First $1B business with one human employee will happen in 2026, says Anthropic CEO
Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETAI can perform tasks such as writing, coding, reasoning, and researching with great accuracy — all tasks that are key to starting your own company. That begs the question: Can AI help people start their very own billion-dollar business? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the answer is yes, and it’s sooner than you may think.When asked at Anthropic’s first developer conference, Code with Claude, when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee would happen, Amodei confidently responded, “2026.”Also: Anthropic’s latest Claude AI models are here – and you can try one for free todayAt the same event, Anthropic unveiled its most powerful family of models yet — Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 — which can code, reason, and support agentic capabilities better than ever before. These new AI agents should unlock new opportunities for people to optimize how they work, develop products, and even build their own startups. According to Amodei, the first industries to see this type of efficiency will be those that don’t need human institution-centric stuff to make money, or industries in which the core of the business model isn’t reliant on human interaction. More