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. anthropic.com/institute/recu…

Today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2021-2025.

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.

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.

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.

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 could revolutionize society—medicine, technology, the economy—for the better. But it may also compound alignment issues and ultimately lead to loss of control.

The Anthropic Institute (in collaboration with external stakeholders) will conduct research to think through the implications of increasingly powerful, potentially self-improving systems—and how to create the ability for the world to make deliberate choices about the future development of the technology.

Read the full post: anthropic.com/institute/recu…