Anthropic’s CFO reveals the company’s biggest AI power users aren’t engineers, they’re accountants

The person consuming the most AI tokens inside one of the world’s most advanced AI companies isn’t an engineer, a researcher, or a product manager. It’s the head of tax. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao made the reveal during a May 13 appearance on the Invest Like the Best podcast, noting that senior finance professionals have become the heaviest internal users of Claude, the company’s flagship AI model. The finance team’s AI playbook Rao described a finance organization that has gone far beyond casual AI experimentation. The team maintains between 70 and 150 custom Claude “skills,” which are essentially purpose-built workflows and agents stored in shared repositories similar to GitHub. Statutory financial statements, the kind of documents that traditionally require painstaking human assembly, are now predominantly generated by Claude with human review layered on top. Weekly revenue and compute utilization reports that used to consume several hours now take roughly 30 minutes. Rao also mentioned that Anthropic tracks internal token usage through leaderboards. These are purely informational and aren’t tied to compensation or performance reviews. Why the tax team, of all people The fact tha...