Is Anthropic going to replace every software company in the world?

somerandomusername

Imagine your entire business model is based on offering a piece of software to your customers and charging millions of dollars a year for it. Well now 1 person in a couple days can use Anthropic's Claude code and recreate your entire software business for a few hundred bucks in compute power…

I can't possibly see how these software companies can stay in business? It's going to be a race to the bottom surely? Anthropic is going to bankrupt software companies one at a time. The first to go will be the companies which are pretty much 100% software with no hardware component. One's like Salesforce, Crowdstrike, ServiceNow, Relx, Intuit etc.

I reckon in 10 years Anthropic might be the only software company that exists and just has 100 subsidiaries.

finbaar

I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.

Frozen_up_north

Claude sometimes gets programming correct, equally it can produce garbage.

I recently used Claude to produce some excellent coding including a nice looking web interface. I was impressed that it only needed a minor tweak, then worked perfectly. The whole process literally only took a few minutes.

Subsequent coding attempts have not proved successful, even after the learning curve of my early success.

Simple web queries can save time, but short cuts via AI, instead of thumbing through a manual have produced well formatted and very convincing output that was plain wrong.

Yes I am cynical, the old expression of garbage in equals garbage out also applies to AI generated output.

Try it yourself to produce an Excel spreadsheet as an example…

Newbie_John

Yeah, there's so much more than that. There's a lot of better and cheaper products than Salesforce so why is it still popular? It's trusted, people know how to use it, it's reliable, there are developers that know how to adjust it to company needs etc. There's also marketing, brand, great sales people. A lot of large companies already have it and trying to migrate to another system is quite complex process, many find it too risky. Would any major company risk moving to untested, untrusted tool?

Also creating a new tool.. it takes 10% time to create 90% of software and then 90% time to finish it to be production ready. It's easier to improve an existing tool than start from scratch.

Also another thing that we don't see yet - the costs of running all AI things - once money ends and many gets addicted to it - it will start getting expensive.

Also look at previous events - did internet shops replace all high street shops? Yes, some, but they still there, they adapted.

forgotmyname

Because it only knew that code what code it found on the internet already, ask it to do something that has never been
done before and it will be stumped.

Also if there is a security flaw in the original code it will keep repeating it in everything it creates.

And as mentioned above the more demand it gets the dearer it's going to get, look at all the free tools you could
use just a few months back. No registration no login now often requires both and sometimes a subscription.
Someone needs to pay for the hardware, same old story get you hooked and then the price increases.

QrizB

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81893281#Comment_81893281

I nominate this reply for the "understatement of the month" award 😂

Cryptix

AI removes the repetitive, boring work for software engineers but it can’t replace humans - at least not yet anyway.

IBM recently had a hiring spree as they found the limitations of AI: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/02/18/corporate-america-is-rethinking-ai-workforce-needs-led-by-ibm/

GDB2222

I recently photographed a document with lots of simple calculations and copied it into CoPilot. It was able to provide a nice spreadsheet that duplicates the document with minimal prompting. It turned a 30 minute job into a 5 minute one.