AI begins to invade all walks of life: After "programming automation", AI giants rush to "automate everything"

# Zhao Ying

Source: Wall Street CN

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor are locked in fierce competition, expanding AI agents from coding to travel booking, mortgage applications, and organizing medical records—touching nearly every scenario of human work. The enterprise market is seen as a “multi-trillion-dollar opportunity,” yet behind the boom lies heavy subsidized spending, waves of layoffs, and a wholesale restructuring of knowledge work that no one can avoid.

The explosive growth of AI coding tools is pushing the entire tech industry toward a far more ambitious goal: automating all aspects of human life using natural language commands. The race is no longer confined to code, but aims at the full restructuring of knowledge work.

Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and startup Cursor are rapidly pushing the boundaries of “AI coding assistants” outward. From drafting work reports and coordinating family schedules to applying for mortgages and organizing medical records, AI agents are penetrating ordinary users’ daily lives with near-zero barriers to entry. Denise Dresser, Chief Revenue Officer at OpenAI, described the shift in how enterprises use AI over the past 30 days as a “wildfire moment,” calling it a “fundamental switch.”

This transformation has left its mark on capital markets. According to The Wall Street Journal, the potential of related technologies has sparked deep reflection among investors and corporate executives on industry reshaping, triggering a market sell-off worth up to $1 trillion. Tens of thousands of layoffs have meanwhile been attributed to the accelerating penetration of AI.

## From “Writing Code” to “Doing Everything”: The Boundaries of AI Agents Are Disappearing

The revolution began with the rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding tools.

Cursor pioneered its tool in 2023, enabling non-engineers to build software, apps, and websites without knowledge of C or Python, launching what the industry calls the “vibe-coding” era. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, publicly called it one of his “favorite” AI tools.

But coding is merely an entry point. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, stated that ChatGPT’s long-term vision has always been to become a “super assistant” that “can actually help you get things done.” Felix Rieseberg, engineering lead for Anthropic’s non-technical task feature Cowork, defined 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 build presentations, once spending up to $100,000 annually on AI tools. He said his travel bookings, vacation planning, email management, shopping lists, and even music recommendations are all handled by AI.

## A Hundred-Billion-Dollar Market Emerges: Enterprise Contracts Are the Real Goldmine

Behind this race, a massive commercial opportunity is taking shape.

Anthropic and OpenAI currently charge around $200 per month for their top-tier AI tools. In February this year, Anthropic disclosed that Claude Code had reached an annualized revenue run rate of $2.5 billion. OpenAI has not released specific revenue figures for Codex, but said Codex now has over 2 million weekly active users, with traffic surging eightfold in roughly the past two months.

Tunguz estimates that AI agents could generate around $36 billion in annualized consumer market revenue in the near future, but notes that the real profit driver will be enterprise contracts—a far larger market opportunity than consumer chatbots.

“When you think about the future of knowledge work, this is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for enterprises,” OpenAI’s Dresser said. “Virtually anything you can think of and describe, you can build.”

For OpenAI and Anthropic, winning the non-technical user market is particularly urgent—both companies are accelerating toward initial public offerings, which could come as early as late this year.

## Burning Cash for Market Share: Can the Subsidy War Continue?

Behind rapid growth lies a costly battle for market dominance.

According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI and Anthropic currently charge far less for platform usage than their actual operating costs, mirroring the early market-grabbing strategy of Uber and Lyft with heavily discounted rides. For instance, Anthropic’s $200 monthly subscription plan provides premium users with token credits worth up to $1,000.

Cursor now boasts an annualized revenue run rate of over $2 billion, doubling in roughly three months, with headcount expanding to about 400 and a latest valuation of $29.3 billion. Despite repeated claims that “Cursor killers” such as Claude Code and Codex will end the company, its growth momentum remains intact.

Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex, admitted that growth itself has created immense operational pressure. A surprise surge in user numbers caused technical outages on Codex in mid-March. “We have to keep building new data centers while investing in efficiency and scaling underlying infrastructure,” he said.

## Disruption Has Arrived: From Programmers to Doctors, No One Is Spared

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

Claude Code took off quickly after its official launch in early 2025, going viral especially following Anthropic’s model update last November, and accelerating its spread beyond engineers in December. Its leader Boris Cherny said Claude Code began as a personal project after he joined Anthropic in fall 2024. “I started building this product for myself.”

In February this year, Claude Code held its first-anniversary celebration. Attendees included a practicing cardiologist from Belgium, who used Claude Code to build an app helping patients navigate medical procedures, and a California lawyer who automated the building permit approval process with the tool.

Cherny was blunt about the impact of this shift: “To me, programming is the new literacy. But fortunately, learning to program is much easier than learning to read now, because you don’t have to practice—the tool does it for you. But I’m not going to sugarcoat it—this is going to be extremely disruptive.”

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