Anthropic Warns Claude AI Is Building Itself Faster Than Expected
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
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
Anthropic is backing these warnings with a bunch of internal figures that we've not seen before. More than 80% of the code merged into its production codebase as of last month was authored by Claude, up from low single digits before Claude Code reached research preview in February last year. Anthropic says the typical engineer is now merging 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025."
On the hardest, least-specified coding tasks, Anthropic said Claude succeeded 76% of the time in May 2026, a rise of 50 percentage points in six months. A recurring internal test that asks each new model to make training code run faster saw results climb from roughly triple the original speed with Claude Opus 4 in May 2025 to about 52 times with the unreleased Mythos Preview model in April.
Anthropic said it'd slow or pause only if rival labs at or near the frontier did the same in a verifiable way, and that a halt by one company would change who leads without achieving anything wider. That's obviously not going to happen.
All the figures cited by Anthropic are self-reported and unaudited, and come days after the company filed to go public. The company issued a similar self-assessment in April, when it said Mythos Preview had found thousands of severe software vulnerabilities, a claim that later drew scrutiny over how much of it rested on a small manual sample.
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