Claude Code Head Boris Cherny: Insane Growth, Tokenmaxxing, AI Agents' Next Frontier

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
Let's talk with Claude Code head Boris Cherney about the product's explosive growth, what's next on the roadmap, and whether all of this is sustainable. That's coming up right after this.
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Claude Codehead, Boris Cherney is here with us in studio. We're going to talk all about the product, the way it's taken off, what's next on the roadmap, and of course, whether it's sustainable. We're going to go into things like token maxing, token inefficiency, and then of course, the future of knowledge work. So no lack of topics to cover. Boris, it's so great to see you. Welcome to the show.

**Boris Cherny** (1:49)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:50)
So let's talk a little bit to begin with about the growth of Claude Code.
It's been massive, right? I think at a recent event, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic, talked about how demand for Anthropic's products has been up like 80 times year over year. I remember speaking with him last year around this time, and he was thrilled that Anthropic was at $4 billion ARR. That seems quite right now. The numbers right now say maybe it's $45 billion, right? So, a 10x there, 80x demand, and the question is how fast the company can serve the demand here. But talk about the portion of demand that Claude Code makes up and what you've seen in terms of demand growth and the amount of people using this thing.

**Boris Cherny** (2:35)
For an increasing number of people in the world, I think the way that you use agents and the way that you use AI, it's not just Anthropic products, but it's Claude Code in particular. Of course, for Anthropic, there's a lot of different products. There's Claude Code, there's Quad AI Chat, there's Quad Design, there's Cowork, there's API products. There's a lot of ways to experience Anthropic. But for a lot of people, Claude Code is their first introduction.
The growth has just been insane. When we first released it internally, it just skyrocketed immediately. Before we even released Claude Code to anyone outside of Anthropic, we felt that it's pretty likely that this is going to be a hit.
Around the time that we released Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, this was in May of last year, the growth just went exponential. I've just never seen growth this deep. Then it just kept going more and more exponential. With Opus 4.5, that was November, and then 4.6, that was February of this year, and then 4.7, it just keeps inflecting over and over. There's a lot of people on our team that have worked in tech for a long time. We worked on all sorts of hyper-growth products. This is something you talk about in tech all the time, these unicorns and hyper-growth, but even on the team, we've never seen growth like this.
We're just trying to figure out how do we make it so everyone can continue to experience this? How do we make it so we can continue growing at this pace, the pace that we expect in the future, which might be even steeper than it is today? And we're running a lot about how to do this and how to keep scaling the services.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (4:16)
So a year ago, it was clear that the bulk of usage of Anthropics AI models was happening through the API, right? That would be like a company, like a consulting group, for instance, putting it into action at a bank and the bank using it to summarize some calculations. I'm just throwing an example out there.