Anthropic – the company behind the artificial intelligence platform Claude – anticipates that digital AI employees will appear on corporate networks in the next year, the organization's top security leader informed Axios.

Jason Clinton, Anthropic's chief information security officer, noted that these virtual workers could mark the next area of innovation in the AI space, the outlet reported. 

The AI entities would have "memories," parts to play within the business, and company accounts and passwords – they would have much greater autonomy than agents currently do now, Axios noted.

"In that world, there are so many problems that we haven't solved yet from a security perspective that we need to solve," Clinton said, according to the outlet.

AI employees could hack the system in which code is merged and tested prior to being rolled out, he reportedly suggested. 

"In an old world, that's a punishable offense," Clinton noted, according to the outlet. "But in this new world, who's responsible for an agent that was running for a couple of weeks and got to that point?"

He said that virtual employee security is among the largest security spaces where AI businesses may invest in the coming years, Axios noted.

Fox News Digital reached out to Anthropic for comment on Tuesday, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.