How a Self-Taught Programmer Became the Father of Claude Code

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has given the AI startup its breakthrough hit, with revenue that has skyrocketed past $2.5 billion.

Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, almost parted ways with Anthropic for good last summer. Instead, he has helped shape the coding agent into a megahit that has closed the distance with rival OpenAI.

Claude Code has supercharged Anthropic’s growth. After rising from $1 billion in December to $2.5 billion in February, Claude Code’s annualized revenue has accelerated in recent weeks, Cherny said, helping propel Anthropic’s revenue on that basis to $30 billion.

The growth vindicates Cherny’s decision to return to Anthropic after making a brief sojourn last summer to coding-tool startup Cursor that at the time seemed to give that smaller rival a major boost. In the months since Cherny came back, Claude Code has shaken up a tech industry that was already enthralled by AI, spawning a new era of AI agents, hastening a decline in software stocks and remaking the jobs of software engineers.