Anthropic Says Entry-Level Tech Hires Fell to 9% While Korn Ferry Finds 81% of Firms Plan to Hire More

Since Harvard economists said on Oct. 22 that unemployment was holding near 4.1% despite a wave of AI layoff headlines, two new reports have pushed the entry-level question back into focus. They point in opposite directions.

What Anthropic says happened inside its own walls

On Oct. 16, Anthropic's economics team (Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory) published a report on how AI has reshaped employment at the company. It draws on internal data covering hiring, AI use, output, surveys and calendars, plus 17 employee interviews.

The headline numbers are stark. Anthropic says agents now log six hours of work for every human hour. It says entry-level technical hires dropped from nearly 30% of hires to 9% since March 2025, and that junior headcount fell from about 21% to 14%.

Employees now spend about 22% of their time managing Claude agents, more than double a year earlier, according to Anthropic's analysis of chat summaries. The company also says it takes in two to four times as much revenue per employee as Meta and Google did at the peak of their own rapid growth.

Anthropic says talk of weaker demand for junior technical staff began in January 2026, when teams leaning hardest on Claude found coding and bug-finding could be offloaded. One interviewee said a new model "basically overnight changed what we were looking for." Hiring managers now stress autonomy and judgment over specific technical skills.

The company says it has built an early warning system to track jobs at risk of disruption and has prioritized moving employees into new roles internally. Its report floats one possible future: "single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents."

Skeptics question the motive and the cause

Some AI researchers told The Guardian the report is probably an effort to lift Anthropic's valuation ahead of its initial public offering. They compared it to SpaceX touting proposed space datacenters before its June market debut. Anthropic's report itself makes no such statement, and the researchers' claim about motive is theirs alone.

The Guardian also noted that Dario Amodei's predictions last year, that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and write 90% of code within six months, did not come true.

Morgan Frank, a Case Western Reserve University researcher, has a paper in peer review showing AI-exposed job markets deteriorated well before ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. His finding complicates the argument by some tech executives that AI is behind the recent layoffs.

That cuts against Anthropic's framing, but it does not refute the narrower claim. One company's hiring mix can shift because of its own tools even if the broader market was already weak.

A survey says firms plan to hire more

Korn Ferry's AMS business released a report on Oct. 21 saying 81% of firms plan to increase entry-level hiring over the next two years. It also found 76% of recruiters and hiring managers do not believe entry-level jobs will vanish from their firms.

"Companies are realizing that early-career roles are key to aligning AI and the future leadership pipeline for the organization," said Janet Mertens, managing director of AMS Research at the Korn Ferry Institute.

The same report carries a warning. Entry-level postings make up a historically low 38% of available roles. Unemployment among recent college graduates is 5.6%, against 4.2% overall. Ron Seifert, Korn Ferry's North America workforce reward and benefits leader, said: "There's no doubt entry-level hiring has dropped from where it has been historically."

The report adds that several finance, professional services and tech firms have announced plans to scale back entry-level hiring. Some experts told Korn Ferry that Gen Alpha, the cohort born 2010 to 2024, may be viewing its prospects through rose-colored glasses.

Nearly 60% of Gen Alpha believe they will find a job, Korn Ferry says. Nearly 70% would accept project-based, part-time or temporary work, and many are eyeing energy, healthcare and the public sector. More than half of Gen Z workers fear being laid off, many citing AI.

What the jobs may look like

A Forbes piece describes a different kind of entry-level job emerging: young hires paid to oversee AI output and fix errors, with little training and a murky path upward. It sorts the roles into "mindless" and "mindful" AI babysitting and says college graduates often feel underutilized.

That is a commentary on a trend, not a measured count. Neither Anthropic nor Korn Ferry puts a number on how many such roles exist.

The open question

The two reports are not measuring the same thing. Anthropic reports realized hiring at one AI-saturated company. Korn Ferry reports what firms say they intend to do.

The Korn Ferry window runs two years. If the 38% share of entry-level postings and the 5.6% recent-graduate unemployment rate do not move, that intent will not have turned into hiring. Frank's paper, once through peer review, will show whether the pre-ChatGPT deterioration he describes holds up.