Anthropic has published a new account of how quickly its AI models are advancing, warning that the technology may soon be capable of improving itself without meaningful human involvement. Just as the AI lab, valued at almost $1 trillion, prepares to go public, it’s also urging an industrywide pause in AI development.
In the now-viral blog post on Thursday, authors Marina Favaro and Jack Clark argue that AI development at Anthropic has already shifted dramatically: More than 80% of code merged into the company’s codebase is now written by Claude, and engineers are shipping roughly eight times as much code per quarter as they were before 2025. The authors say this trajectory is heading toward “recursive self-improvement”—a process in which AI systems autonomously design, build, and train their own successors, without humans driving each step.
