AI might let one or two people run billion-dollar companies by 2026, says top CEO | Trending

Artificial intelligence could soon lead to the rise of solopreneurs, one or two staff members who could single-handedly run a billion-dollar company as early as 2026, Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said.

At Anthropic’s Code with Claude developer conference, Amodei claimed that new AI models are so advanced that they could help single-person businesses grow like never before. 

Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who is also Anthropic’s chief product officer, asked Amodei if a single person could create such a business using AI; he said it could happen as early as 2026.

“I think it’ll be in an area where you don’t need a lot of human-institution-centric stuff to make money,” Amodei added, suggesting that proprietary trading would be the first to be automated like that.

Solopreneurs possible with AI

He also suggested that by integrating AI, single-person companies creating tools for software developers could grow as prime candidates for businesses that don’t require many salespeople and can automate customer service.

“It’s not that crazy. I built a billion-dollar company with 13 people. I think now you’d be able to do a better job than we did with AI,” Krieger said, adding that Instagram had to scale up because of content moderation.

In 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion.

Could he have built Instagram solo with Claude 4? Not quite, said Krieger. He’d still need his original co-founder, Kevin Systrom — but with Claude’s help, the two of them could probably pull it off.

At the same event, Anthropic launched Claude 4, its latest line of advanced AI models. The lineup includes Claude 4 Opus,  a powerful but pricey model described as “the world’s best coding model”, and Claude 4 Sonnet, a more affordable, mid-sized option designed for broader use.

(Also read: OpenAI model disobeys humans, refuses to shut down. Elon Musk says ‘concerning’)