Anthropic details its progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications, and says Claude has authored 80%+ of the code merged into its codebase
Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications. — For most of AI's history, humans drove every step in its development cycle.
Anthropic
Related Coverage
- Anthropic says 80% of its new production code is now authored by Claude — how your enterprise can keep up VentureBeat · Carl Franzen
- Anthropic wants AI development to slow down globally, warns humans could lose control otherwise The Economic Times
- Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence One Useful Thing · Ethan Mollick
- China poaches more AI talent from the U.S. as it eyes the next ‘super-app’ CNBC
- Anthropic Warns AI Could Soon Build Better Versions Of Itself, Calls For Industry-Wide Pause Benzinga
- Anthropic Calls for Global Pause on AI Development Amid Rising Concern Over Self-Improving Models Tech Times · Jose Enrico
- AI vs Humans? Anthropic's engineers don't know what their job is anymore Digit · Vyom Ramani
- Anthropic says self-improving AI may be closer than expected Cointelegraph · Stephen Kattestaff
- My internal monologue reading Anthropic's big idea posts Constellation Research · Larry Dignan
- Anthropic calls for global AI slowdown after $965B valuation. Critics claim it's just to hobble competition. New York Post · Marc Vartabedian
- AI Is Already Developing AI, Says Anthropic—And Humans May Be Slowing Things Down Decrypt · Jason Nelson
- Anthropic's RSI warning contrasts with IPO filing The Deep View · Nat Rubio-Licht
- Anthropic calls for global pause in AI development before humans lose control SiliconANGLE · Mike Wheatley
- How Microsoft took on the OpenClaw fad Runtime · Tom Krazit
- What happens when AI starts building AI? Anthropic explains The Indian Express
- AI Will Soon Be Able To Improve Without Human Involvement, Anthropic Says International Business Times · Demian Bio
- Anthropic Calls for Frontier AI Freeze to Prevent Self-Building Tech PYMNTS
- Anthropic made Claude worse for a month — this is how they got caught MakeUseOf · Yadullah Abidi
- Anthropic warns AI could soon help build its own successors Axios · Ashley Gold
- When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement Hacker News
- Anthropic proposes a global slowdown of AI development Engadget · Mariella Moon
- Anthropic Calls for AI Pause Button to Let Humans Take Stock Bloomberg · Amy Thomson
- Anthropic confronts the RSI clock The Rundown AI
- Anthropic Urges AI Industry to Prepare Emergency Pause Strategy as Self-Improving Systems Loom Blockonomi · Trader Edge
- Anthropic calls for AI research slowdown as model capabilities accelerate DigiTimes
- Anthropic Warns Self-Evolving AI Could Become Uncontrollable Seoul Economic Daily · Kim Chang-young
- Anthropic says something unsettling has been happening to Claude The Independent · Anthony Cuthbertson
- Anthropic says Claude now writes over 90% of its code and wants the world to have an AI pause button The Decoder · Matthias Bastian
- Anthropic warns Claude AI is building itself faster than expected, calls for option to halt frontier development — ‘recursive self improvement’ increases risk humans lose control of AI Tom's Hardware · Luke James
- 😺 Anthropic: AI Is Building AI now The Neuron · Grant Harvey
- Anthropic Says AI May Soon Upgrade Itself Without Human Help Benzinga · Caroline Ryan
- ‘It would be good for the world’ to slow down AI sprints, Anthropic says The Register · O'Ryan Johnson
- Anthropic calls for AI development slowdown to ensure safety Semafor · Tom Chivers
- ‘They want to build a moat’: Anthropic's scary warnings about rapid AI ‘self-improvement’ and ‘temporarily’ pausing development aren't convincing the cynics TechRadar · David Nield
- Anthropic warns that AI will soon be able to improve itself without human intervention CNN · Chris Isidore
- AI is designing OpenAI's next model in a sign of ‘super intelligence’: SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to CNBC CNBC · Arjun Kharpal
- Anthropic suggests slowing AI research until we can align it with human goals CIO.com · Gyana Swain
- Anthropic says Claude writes 80% of its own code and the world needs a plan to hit the brakes The Next Web · Alina Maria Stan
- Anthropic ponders self-improving AI Sherwood News · Jon Keegan
- When AI Builds Itself Shelly Palmer
- SoftBank CEO Says OpenAI's Newest Model Is a Sign That AI Is Reaching ‘Super Intelligence’ International Business Times · Demian Bio
- Can we really put the brakes on AI development? The Week
- Anthropic Says Claude Now Writes 80% of Its Production Code, Targets Full Self-Improving AI WinBuzzer · Markus Kasanmascheff
- Anthropic proposes ‘Pause Button’ for advanced AI amid fears of self-improvement beyond human oversight The Tech Portal · Ashutosh Singh
- Anthropic Calls For Slowdown In Global AI Development The Daily Caller · Ireland Owens
Discussion
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor. It's happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. https://www.anthropic.com/...
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
Today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2021-2025. [image]
-
@alexalbert__
Alex Albert
on x
We just published internal data on how much of Claude's development is already being done by Claude: - Over 80% of all code merged into our codebase is now written by Claude - It's been months since many researchers at Anthropic hand-wrote code - The typical Anthropic engineer sh…
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
Each time we release a model, we run the same test: give it code that trains a small AI model, ask the new model to speed it up. It takes a skilled human 4-8 hours to reach 4x faster. In May 2024, Claude Opus 4 averaged a ~3x speedup. This April, Mythos Preview achieved ~52x.
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
None of this guarantees recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. It's not yet clear that Claude is capable of research judgment—of choosing the right problems to work on. But if these trends continue, AI systems designing and building their own successors is plausible. This
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
AI research is a series of next-step decisions. We looked at sessions where a human researcher took a wrong turn, showed Claude the session up to that point, and asked it what to do next. Mythos Preview improved on humans 64% of the time—up from 22% in 2024. [image]
-
@andrewcurran_
Andrew Curran
on x
Anthropic says Recursive Self Improvement is approaching faster than they expected. Quoting from the blog: 'What should we do? If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think [i…
-
@romeovdean
Romeo Dean
on x
This paragraph reads a bit defeatist. And “training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos” seems overstated. How tractable of a technical problem is it to create a solution to verify training runs aren't happening? My view is its could be done with a few hundred [imag…
-
@beffjezos
@beffjezos
on x
This is why they didn't release Mythos. Incentivized to compound their lead rather than make models available to their potential competitors. For all the Doomer talk of Singleton superintelligence, they are sure behaving in a way that would hyperstition that outcome
-
@matthewberman
Matthew Berman
on x
recursive self improvement is right around the corner anthropic is willing to slow down, but only if everyone else slows dow nice position to be in when you're in the lead 🤔
-
@joel_bkr
Joel Becker
on x
my main takeaway from this post is how unsurprising model capabilities + state of AI R&D automation is vs. expectations based only on public evidence. the internal-external gap is smaller than you might think. https://x.com/...
-
@emollick
Ethan Mollick
on x
“As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude.” Matches independent measures. There really is no sign this is slowing down (which doesn't mean there aren't organizational challenges to absorbing this much productivity gain) […
-
@kimmonismus
@kimmonismus
on x
Holy moly, Anthropic is getting very serious about recursive self-improvement! One word: acceleration. Insane blog article. Tl;dr: •We are close to an AI capable of fully autonomously designing and building its own successor •They stress this isn't here yet and isn't [image]
-
@scaling01
@scaling01
on x
Claude Mythos speeds up training code of small AI models by 52x Humans need 4-8 hours to reach a 4x speedup [image]
-
@scaling01
@scaling01
on x
Anthropic is shipping 3.2x more code per person with Mythos nowadays than with Opus 4.5 around half a year ago [image]
-
@willdepue
Will Depue
on x
i will say i was pretty surprised at how little hesitation anyone had before immediately jumping to build RSI the moment it seemed possible i'm not a foomer, but hey, i thought this was what everyone was really worried about? right? it's truly the yudkowsky ‘torment nexus’ era
-
@eli_lifland
Eli Lifland
on x
Kudos to Anthropic for writing about this! I'm confused that even in their most aggressive scenarios humans still “play a substantially diminished role in [AI] development.” Does Anthropic really think that humans will stay relevant indefinitely? [image]
-
@_sholtodouglas
Sholto Douglas
on x
Programming has already changed dramatically. On my best days - I literally feel IO bandwidth limited managing the concurrent threads. As the models get better the level of abstraction will keep going up - very soon the models will only come to us for hard calls. Eventually -
-
@mtslive
@mtslive
on x
SITUATION EXPLAINED: Anthropic just published data on how fast AI itself is accelerating AI development. Here are the numbers: • Claude's success rate on open-ended coding problems: 76% • On a standard AI training speedup task: Opus 4 got 3X in May 2024. Mythos Preview got [video…
-
@tensor_rotator
Alek Dimitriev
on x
In case you're wondering, yes we're feeling the AGI. [image]
-
@eliebakouch
Elie
on x
great article on RSI by anthropic, i'm a bit curious about this plot i don't think they clarify if people used opus 4.7 when it was release, i'm guessing no, but then it's a bit missleading to put it here imo? i actually think the 4 week trailing average make it hard to see the […
-
@anthropicai
@anthropicai
on x
The speedup isn't just in volume. On open-ended coding problems where answers are unclear, Claude's success rate is now 76%—a 50 point jump in just 6 months. Many engineers also say Claude's code quality is now on par with human code; we expect it to be better within the year. [i…
-
@cerebras
@cerebras
on x
We are in the recursive age of AI. Faster inference => faster AI development. Our take on this from the hardware perspective: https://www.cerebras.ai/...
-
@sleepinyourhat
Sam Bowman
on x
The acceleration of technical R&D here over the last few months has been wild. This gives a pretty good picture of what it's been like:
-
@ahall_research
Andy Hall
on x
Could a global slowdown in frontier AI model development really happen? In the midst of progress towards RSI, Anthropic here floats the idea. Demis Hassabis has been floating the same idea, including when he spoke at Stanford a few weeks ago. This would have seemed totally
-
Christian Ryan
Christian Ryan
on linkedin
Recursive self-improvement is not here, nor is it inevitable. But if current trends hold, AI designing and building its own successors is no longer a fringe scenario. …
-
Parag Lokhande
Parag Lokhande
on linkedin
One idea I can't stop thinking about after reading Anthropic's latest article: what happens when AI starts meaningfully improving the next generation of AI? …
-
Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick
on linkedin
I think it is really worth reading this piece on RSI at Anthropic. — There is a bit of navel-gazing, some marketing …
-
@mergesort.me
Joe Fabisevich
on bluesky
This was a really good read. A lot of people are going to focus on specific numbers mentioned in the blog post like “we estimate these 800 API fixes would have taken 4 years”, but I recommend reading the whole thing holistically as a write up of how software development processe…
-
@emollick
Ethan Mollick
on bluesky
“As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude” — Matches independent measures. There is no sign this is slowing down (which doesn't mean there aren't organizational challenges to absorbing this much productivity) www.anthr…
-
@davidcrespo
@davidcrespo
on bluesky
they always want to sound measured but I'm going to go on record and say this is obviously going to be the case — www.anthropic.com/institute/ re... [image]
-
@isolyth.dev
Eris
on bluesky
We are at the stage of labs declaring very near future RSI. Claude writes 80% of Anthropic's code now. They expect Claude written code to be better than human written code, generally, before the end of this year. They're aware of possible oil shocks slowing progress. They dou…
-
@timkellogg.me
Tim Kellogg
on bluesky
ALERT ALERT they're posting about RSI on main — www.anthropic.com/institute/ re...
-
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social
Erik Jonker
on mastodon
Interesting blog from Anthropic about RSI, AI & coding, ofcourse from their perspective but worth reading, — https://www.anthropic.com/... #ai #rsi #coding #anthropic
-
r/neoliberal
r
on reddit
When AI builds itself
-
r/accelerate
r
on reddit
“Holy moly, Anthropic is getting very serious about recursive self-improvement! One word: acceleration. Insane blog article. Tl;dr: …
-
r/ArtificialInteligence
r
on reddit
When AI builds itself
-
r/ClaudeAI
r
on reddit
How claude builds claude at Anthropic
-
r/singularity
r
on reddit
Mythos can improve speed of training code 52x (compared to human 4x at 4-8hrs)
-
r/technology
r
on reddit
Anthropic warns Claude may be accelerating AI development toward self-improving systems “faster than we thought.
-
@shubhendu
Shubhendu Trivedi
on bluesky
One could read most points here cynically. But could also take them at their word and see what could be done. Given the sort of equilibrium we have been post GPT-2, the sort of pause they are advocating is simply not going to happen. You are talking of powerful international a…
-
Pramod Khargonekar
Pramod Khargonekar
on linkedin
Interesting release from Anthropic. Recursive self improvement would be a major development. To what extent are extrapolations from their current progress …
-
Vlad Khononov
Vlad Khononov
on linkedin
So Anthropic published an article claiming Claude is accelerating AI development. The proof? Lines of code. …
-
@timkellogg.me
Tim Kellogg
on bluesky
even this. They used “lines of code” as a value measure, and then immediately laughed it off (as they should) because it can actually be a negative indicatora — bsky.app/profile/timk... [embedded post]