Anthropic’s Claude Code is changing how developers code, growing rapidly and outperforming its rivals.
I spoke with Boris Cherny, the lead for Claude Code, to understand how the company is adapting. “We built the simplest possible thing,” he explained. He was surprised to learn that half of Anthropic’s sales team uses Claude Code weekly.
AI coding has changed a lot. From 2021 to 2024, many tools just suggested a few lines of code. By early 2025, new companies like Cursor and Windsurf began making tools that let developers explain what they wanted in simple words while the AI did the rest.
Claude Code launched around the same time. Cherny admits that some early versions made mistakes or got stuck. He believes they designed Claude Code for the future of AI, not just where the tech was at first.
That decision seems to have paid off. Many developers think AI coding has made big leaps lately, especially after the launch of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude Opus 4.5.
Kian Katanforoosh, a teacher at Stanford and CEO of Workera, said his company switched to Claude Code after trying different tools. He found that it worked better for his senior engineers compared to Cursor and Windsurf.
“The only model I can point to with a major improvement in coding lately is Claude Opus 4.5,” he said. “It feels like it has discovered an improved way to code.”
Last year, the AI coding market grew quickly. In November, Anthropic announced that Claude Code had hit $1 billion in yearly revenue, less than a year after it launched.
By the end of 2025, Claude Code’s revenue had grown by at least another $100 million. This product made up about 12 percent of Anthropic’s total revenue of around $9 billion. Although coding is smaller than Anthropic’s business with entire companies, it’s one of the fastest-growing areas.
Anthropic also aims to be profitable by 2028, and Claude Code is expected to play a crucial role in its growth. The company has chosen not to comment on its finances.
While Anthropic feels strong in AI coding, Claude Opus 4.5 seems to be boosting other companies too. Cursor, which lets people code using models from Anthropic and others, also reached $1 billion in revenue in November. In December, the company reported solid growth in its revenue month over month. Other big names like OpenAI, Google, and xAI are also trying to grab bigger shares of the AI coding market.
Now, Anthropic wants to build on the success of Claude Code to create tools for areas beyond coding. Recently, they introduced Cowork, an AI tool that can help manage files and interact with software without needing to code.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.