Anthropic isn't sizing its market as software. It's sizing it as labor: over 600 billion hours of it at U.S. wage rates.
Anthropic isn't sizing its market as software. It's sizing it as labor. At $30 trillion, that's a lot of labor: over 600 billion hours at U.S. wage rates. The impact from this change is going to be massive.
Start with how software has mostly been priced: per seat. With agents able to act independently, the person using the software is no longer the core unit to measure. The unit is labor, and that's what Anthropic is doing. It will totally change how software is priced.
All software worldwide is about a $1.4 trillion market today. The total addressable market is about 20 times that.
A seat means a person, and a person means a workday. You're valuing the amount of work that person gets done in a day. Agents don't work a set number of hours, and you can spin up as many as you need inside a system or an account. There is no real cap on what a seat can do.
So people move from being the enabler of getting work done to being the constraint on it. Anthropic talks about this in its own systems and development flow: the biggest bottleneck it has right now is well-qualified humans to manage the workflow. The agents can get more done than ever before.
The outcome is that companies will move expense from the labor line of their budget to the software line. That will have a huge social impact, not only for this country but for the world.
Those are big questions we'll need to wrestle with: economically in business, politically with our government, and socially in how we value the work we each do.