Spencer Handley’s online guitar school, Sonora—which claims professional musicians such as Tom Misch and Billy Strings among its students—had been growing steadily for seven years, mostly unaffected by the spread of AI.  Then came Claude Opus 4.5. The AI model, released by Anthropic in late November and trained on specialized data that taught it to complete long running agentic tasks, such as software engineering and administrative work, marked a step change in AI capability, according to multiple entrepreneurs and AI researchers who spoke to TIME. Suddenly, Handley found that the AI could replicate the enterprise software he used to run his business. “I was like, ‘oh, the game has changed. You can clone a billion-dollar company’s [software] with no human intervention,’” he says. The improved AI also rendered some of his employees redundant. All but one of his 12-person team of “setters,” who reached out to potential customers, were let go.…