Overview
Anthropic’s performance engineering team has redesigned their technical hiring test three times as each new Claude model has outperformed human candidates on the original assessment. AI capabilities are rapidly making traditional technical evaluations obsolete, forcing companies to develop increasingly creative evaluation methods to distinguish top human talent from AI-generated solutions.
Key Points
- Over 1,000 candidates completed Anthropic’s take-home optimization test, with dozens hired - but each new Claude model forced a complete test redesign as AI performance matched top human candidates
- Claude Opus 4 outperformed most applicants, then Claude Opus 4.5 matched even the strongest candidates - traditional evaluation methods are becoming useless within months as AI capabilities advance
- Take-home tests offer advantages over live interviews for performance engineering: longer time horizons, realistic environments, and time for comprehension - but these same benefits make them vulnerable to AI assistance
- Anthropic is releasing their original test as an open challenge since humans still exceed Claude’s performance with unlimited time - companies need increasingly unusual approaches to stay ahead of their own AI capabilities