AI begins to penetrate various industries: After "programming automation," AI giants are heading toward "automation of everything."

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The explosive growth of AI programming tools is pushing the entire technology industry toward a grander ambition: automating all aspects of human life with natural language instructions. This race is no longer limited to coding, but is targeting a comprehensive restructuring of knowledge work.

Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and startup Cursor are rapidly expanding the boundaries of “AI programming assistants”—from writing work reports and coordinating family schedules to applying for mortgages and organizing medical records. AI agents are permeating the daily lives of ordinary users in a near-zero-barrier way. OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser has called the past 30 days of enterprise adoption of AI a “wildfire moment” and described it as a “fundamental switch.”

This transformation has already left a mark on the capital markets. According to the Wall Street Journal, the potential of these technologies has triggered deep reflection among investors and corporate executives on industry restructuring, resulting in a market sell-off totaling as much as $1 trillion. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of layoffs have already been attributed to AI’s accelerating penetration.

From “writing code” to “doing everything”: The boundaries of AI agents are disappearing

The starting point of this revolution is the rapid spread of AI-assisted programming tools.

In 2023, Cursor was the first to launch a tool that enabled non-engineers to build software, apps, and websites without knowing C or Python, ushering in what the industry calls the “vibe-coding” era. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly called it his “favorite” AI tool.

But programming is just the entry point. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, says the long-term vision for ChatGPT is always to be a “super-assistant,” “really able to help you get things done.” Felix Rieseberg, engineering lead for non-technical task function Cowork at Anthropic, defines the target users of these tools as “anyone who needs to get work done on a computer.”

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz epitomizes this trend. He uses AI agents to create charts, write blogs, and make presentations, once spending as much as $100,000 a year on AI tools. He says all his travel bookings, vacation planning, email processing, shopping lists, and even music recommendations are handled by AI.

A hundred-billion-dollar market emerges: Enterprise contracts are the true goldmine

Behind the competition, a huge business opportunity is taking shape.

Anthropic and OpenAI currently charge around $200 per month for their top-tier AI tools. In February this year, Anthropic revealed that annualized revenue for Claude Code had reached $2.5 billion; OpenAI has not disclosed Codex’s specific revenues but says Codex now has over 2 million weekly active users, with traffic growing eightfold in roughly the last two months.

Tunguz estimates that AI agents could soon bring about $3.6 billion in annualized consumer market revenue, but points out that the real profit will come from enterprise contracts—a market much larger than consumer chatbots.

OpenAI’s Dresser says: “When you think about the future of knowledge work, this is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity for enterprises. You could almost say that as long as you can imagine it and describe what you want, you can build it.”

For OpenAI and Anthropic, winning over the non-technical user market is especially urgent—both companies are accelerating their push toward IPOs, possibly as soon as later this year.

Burning money for market share: Can the subsidy war continue?

Behind the rapid growth is an expensive battle for the market.

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI and Anthropic currently charge far less for platform usage than their actual operating costs, mirroring Uber and Lyft’s strategy of winning market share with extremely low fares in their early days. For example, Anthropic’s $200 per month subscription plan gives premium users as much as $1,000 worth of tokens.

Cursor’s annualized revenue has now exceeded $2 billion, doubling in about three months, with the staff growing to about 400 people and its latest valuation at $29.3 billion. Although outside voices constantly claim the rise of “Cursor killers” like Claude Code and Codex will end the company, its growth trajectory continues.

Codex head Thibault Sottiaux admits that growth itself brings massive operational pressure. In mid-March, a surprise surge in user numbers caused Codex to experience technical failures. “We have to keep building new data centers and invest in boosting efficiency and expanding the underlying infrastructure,” he said.

Disruption has arrived: From programmers to doctors, no one is exempt

The impact of this technological wave has already spread beyond just software engineers.

After its official launch in early 2025, Claude Code quickly gained popularity, especially after Anthropic released an updated model last November, which underwent viral propagation, and in December it began to quickly spread to groups beyond software engineers. Its head Boris Cherny said that Claude Code was originally just a personal project he started after joining Anthropic in the fall of 2024: “I started by building this product for myself.”

This February, Claude Code celebrated its first anniversary, with attendees including a practicing cardiologist from Belgium—who used Claude Code to build an app helping patients navigate medical processes—and a California lawyer, who used it to automate building permit approvals.

Cherny is unequivocal about the impact of this transformation: “To me, programming is the new literacy, but fortunately, learning to program now is much easier than learning to read, because you don’t need to practice—the tool does it for you. But I don’t want to sugarcoat it—this will be very disruptive.”

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