Claude creator Anthropic says nearly half of all AI agent activity today is concentrated in one field, while deployment in other domains lags far behind.
In a new report titled Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice, Anthropic says software engineering accounts for almost 50% of tool calls on its public API, underscoring how early the broader rollout of autonomous systems still is.
Anthropic defines an agent as “an AI system equipped with tools that allow it to take actions, like running code, calling external APIs, and sending messages to other agents.” Rather than attempting to map full architectures across customers, the company analyzed individual tool calls across thousands of deployments.
The result shows a sharp concentration in coding-related use cases.
Software engineering represents 49.7% of tool calls on Anthropic’s public API. The next largest category, back-office automation, accounts for just 9.1%, followed by “other” at 7.1%.
Marketing and copywriting, sales and CRM, finance and accounting, and data analysis each sit between roughly 3% and 4%.
No other industry category exceeds low single-digit percentages.
Anthropic says the pattern suggests the ecosystem remains in its early phase, with engineers both building and using agentic systems first. Other domains, such as business intelligence, customer service, sales, finance and e-commerce, are beginning to experiment, but remain small in aggregate share.
“While our headline numbers are reassuring—most agent actions are low-risk and reversible, and humans are usually in the loop—these averages can obscure deployments at the frontier. The concentration of adoption in software engineering, combined with growing experimentation in new domains, suggests that the frontier of risk and autonomy will expand.”
The report positions software engineering as the first large-scale proving ground for AI agents, with other industries now beginning to test how far automation can extend beyond code.
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