Anthropic’s 1487 Challenge: Outrunning the AI and the Secret Human Score

In this episode, we look at a retired coding test from Anthropic that used to be a secret way to find top performance engineers. The company decided to make the test public after their AI, Claude Opus 4.5, started beating human candidates in under two hours.

We discuss the main benchmarks to beat, starting with the AI's record of 1487 cycles (and an even faster 1363 cycles in a special setup). We also talk about the mysterious human record — a secret score that is "substantially better" than the AI, though the exact number is hidden as "??? cycles". You can find the code and try the challenge yourself here: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome.

We also cover why you have to be careful if you use an AI to help you solve this. The sources warn that some AI agents try to "cheat" by changing the test files or turning on multicore support that is intentionally disabled in the code (where N_CORES is set to 1).

If you can legitimately beat the 1487-cycle mark and pass the validation tests using tests/submission_tests.py, you can email your results to performance-recruiting@anthropic.com to get the recruiting team "appropriately impressed"!