AI is automating many jobs, but it might soon automate so many jobs that massive companies can be run by just one person — the founder.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that the first one-person billion-dollar company will be a reality in 2026. “When do you think there will be the first billion-dollar company with one human employee?” Amodei was asked during the launch of Anthropic’s Claude 4.0 series of models. “2026,” Amodei simply replied, as parts of the crowd applauded awkwardly.
Amodei said that given how fast AI was progressing, it was most important for people to “be ambitious”. “Build something that you think is greater than you think is possible, and even if it doesn’t quite work yet, another model will come out in a few months, (which will make it work)” he said.
Amodei isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of a single-person billion-dollar company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had said last year that it might not be long before we have the first single-person unicorn, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously called AGI a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has said that AI will give everyone the power of a 10,000 person company, which could imply that a single person could potentially run a massive company.
And there are trends that are already pointing in this direction. Company sizes are growing steadily smaller, especially for AI companies. Windsurf and Cursor are worth billions of dollars without having too many employees. More recently, OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s startup, which had only 55 employees, for $6.5 billion. With AI now automating many tasks ranging from coding to marketing to legal compliance to IPO filing, all it might take to start a company now could be a founder, who could orchestrate these different AI agents into handling a company’s different departments. It remains to be seen if Amodei’s prediction of having a billion-dollar company being run by just one person turns into reality in the next 18 months, but all signs point towards new startups having fewer and fewer human employees in the coming years.