AI has become so effective at writing code and researching that the biggest constraint on developing new AI systems may now be the humans overseeing them, according to a new study by Anthropic.
Claude now authors more than 80% of the code merged into its codebase, Anthropic said, and has helped engineers increase code output roughly eightfold since 2024.
Anthropic said the future could unfold in several ways: AI progress could slow, humans could remain in charge while AI automates much of the work, or AI systems could eventually begin improving their own successors.
“Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor,” Anthropic wrote. “This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.”
The company said it's too early to know which outcome is most likely, but argues that AI is already helping build AI, and acknowledged that lines of code are an imperfect measure of productivity.
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…
The report comes as AI companies increasingly position their models as research collaborators rather than simple chatbots. Still, Anthropic said the increase in code output reflects a broader acceleration in software development driven by increasingly capable AI agents.
“Humans play a substantially diminished role in their development, likely moving most of our effort towards oversight, validation, and verification of an expanding 'virtual lab' run by AI systems,” the company said. “We expect that systems capable of automated AI research and development would have skills that would transfer to the rest of science, allowing them to begin to revolutionize other fields.”
