Bill Gates Names AI Tool That Stunned Him: Anthropic's Claude Code

Bill Gates, who wrote code before most of Silicon Valley was born, names the AI tool that stunned him this year

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says technology has truly stunned him only three times in his life, and the third came this year when he looked closely at Anthropic's AI coding tool, Claude Code. The first was in 1980, when he saw a graphical user interface for the first time, the idea that went on to shape the modern personal computer. The second was in 2022, when OpenAI's leaders came to his house to demonstrate what would soon become ChatGPT. Claude Code hit differently because of what it does. Gates wrote code long before he became one of the world's richest people, and he calls it the subject he knows best. "The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?" he said in a recent interview.

Bill Gates says coding is where AI's progress surprised him most

Gates's reaction carries weight because of where he started. He began programming as a teenager in Seattle, and in 1975 he co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen on the back of software they wrote themselves. For most of his life, writing good code was the skill that set him apart. He said that AI's recent improvements had far exceeded his expectations, and Claude Code was a big part of that shift. It was also one of the reasons he chose to speak out now. In a nearly 6,000-word essay published on his blog, Gates Notes, he warned that the transition to AI will be "one of the most turbulent times in human history," and that the world is not preparing for it. Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool. Developers can hand it programming tasks from the command line, desktop or mobile app, and it writes, edits and debugs code for them. Anthropic showcased it at its Code with Claude developer event in May.

Gates expects AI to reshape software engineering jobs first

Gates has been tracking AI's impact on programmers for a while. Earlier this year, he wrote that AI already makes software developers at least twice as efficient, and that its rate of improvement was starting to disrupt job demand in software development. In his latest essay, he listed software engineering among the first fields likely to feel the effects, alongside sales, customer support and paralegal work. He did offer one caveat. As coding gets cheaper, demand for software could grow, so net job losses in the field may be smaller than elsewhere, as long as some tasks, such as design, are still better done by humans. Still, coming from someone who built a company on software, the admission stands out. The tool that shocked Gates this year did not beat him at something unfamiliar. It beat him at the thing he knows best.