The man behind Claude Code says you’re comparing AI costs to the wrong thing

Good morning. Five years after its founding, Anthropic is preparing for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history. Its coding agent, Claude Code, is already generating an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $2.5 billion. At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday, Boris Cherny, the architect behind Claude Code, made clear why that number is only the beginning—and why the implications extend well beyond engineering teams.

“In the past, there were 50 million people in the world who could code,” Cherny said during a conversation with Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn. “And now everyone in this room can code. Everyone in the world is starting to be able to code.” We’re only beginning to understand the implications, he said.

For CFOs, those implications are immediate—and financial.

Rethinking the ROI framework

The most actionable insight Cherny offered centered on cost justification. Early Claude Code customers balked at the price compared with $20-per-month AI subscriptions, wondering whether Claude was really different from other products.

“And then, six months later, everyone just kind of realized, ‘Okay, I guess it’s not the same exact thing,'” he said.

Cherny offered two pieces of advice. First, don’t compare the ROI to legacy coding tools because Claude Code is fundamentally different.

“Compare it to what the cost would have been if an engineer had done this work,” he said. “That’s the benchmark. That’s what you should be thinking about.”

As an example, he described a developer who recently rewrote an entire codebase from one programming language to another in six days—a project Cherny estimated would previously have required a year of engineering time. Salesforce, Ramp, and Airbnb have reported similar results, he said.

His second recommendation was to evaluate adoption through........

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