Anthropic report: ~80% of Claude session time is spent idly waiting on humans
Hesamation · x · 2026-10-18
Anthropic's new report argues human attention is the constant bottleneck in model-driven acceleration. Measured as wall-clock time minus active agent working time, roughly 80% of interactive Claude sessions are idle waiting for human input — as one engineer put it, people are 'bottlenecking the agents.'
The attached Figure 6 converts Claude's output tokens into reading time (0.75 words/token, 250 words/min): hours per person per week spent just reading Claude output have exploded over the past year — 424 h/week in engineering & research, 43 h in finance & accounting, 35 h in sales & GTM, 27 h in other non-engineering roles, 26 h in legal/policy/trust, and 12 h in marketing & comms.
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