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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei : "Software is going to become cheap, maybe essentially free.

Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-05-17

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts software will become nearly free as AI eliminates the traditional need to amortize development costs across millions of users, while acknowledging the resulting career disruption.

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Topics: software-economicsai-labor-displacementanthropicai-economic-impact

Claims

  • Software will become cheap or essentially free due to AI-driven development.
  • The traditional software business model of amortizing development costs across a large user base will no longer hold.
  • Entire jobs and careers will be disrupted as software economics fundamentally change.

Key quotes

Software is going to become cheap, maybe essentially free. The premise that you need to amortize a piece of software you build across millions of users, that may start to be false. But at the same time, there are whole jobs, whole careers that...