When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

damowangcy

AI tech bro: Month 1 - 6 months to AGI Month 2 - We will Replace all jobs Month 3 - Okay maybe only the SWEs, programming is solved Month 4 - Announce model that is too dangerous to release Month 5 - Releases dangerous model Month 6 - This is it! We will replace AIs with more AIs (*secretly files for IPO) AI is here to stay, like it or not but it is not the solution to everything. If it is, what is Anthropic's moat? A better model? I don't see any ecosystem being built by them, as MCP is almost obsolete except for some very niche use case. And they're doing stuff that a non-profit version of OpenAI would do. Can we trust a for-profit company to stand against their investors during a conflict of interest? Because running a company for maximum profit versus being ethical is two different end of the spectrum.

delichon

Is this the moment when the AI gets permission to approve its own PRs: https://www.italianrenaissance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... Or is this? https://www.egypttoursportal.com/images/2024/02/Ouroboros-Sy...

simianwords

Sorry but if AI can build itself then it can run companies of size 3000 companies with a few people. Or even higher. What are the consequences?

artninja1988

The mythos public release will be a big indicator if the Anthropic and SF story of transformational ai soon holds any water imo

vblanco

Another article about how anthropic wants to ban everyone except themselves and destroy opensource and chinese AIs.

morisil

Quite aligned with my own experience from harness engineering and winning AI4Science hackathon. During the hackathon I was working as a human optimizer, moving the feedback from test harness running on Claude Code, back to my local Claude Code for analysis-hypothesis-proposal cycle. And in this moment I realized that 2 Claudes talking to each other could actually scale much better.

anilgulecha

> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. Interesting - they're commiting to kickoff policy conventions to organize a world-slowdown of frontier LLM building. If they actually are able to crack it, this will give a much needed breather IMO. As exciting as the last ~6 months have been, there's some bigger questions to go answer now.

amelius

Does this train on LLM output, or is this more like iterative self prompt improvement?

nickandbro

So what happens when the world becomes hyper optimized with closed loop AI agents recursively trying to optimize everything deemed sub optimal?

llmslave

I cannot wait for these models to tear down traditional social hierarchies. We havent even begun to see the effects, fingers crossed

techblueberry

> A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure, as it measures quantity over quality. So 8× lines of code/engineer/day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain. Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration. At Anthropic, we don’t reward people for how many lines of code they write; rather, team members are producing more code simply because they’re using AI systems to write more code. I simultaneously think the AI revolution is making real revolutionary gains and am mystified by the lying. An accurate Translation seems to be “we made this shit up, but it feels right”

darepublic

the tooling has quite a ways to go to catch up to the llm engines that drive the real value. I have encountered various codex bugs (I know not anthropic) which tell me that.. these billion dollar companies, if they are eating their own dog food, can still release buggy crap software.

mofeien

> 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 that would likely be a good thing Even Anthropic wants to Pause AI now. There must really be not much time left for "edging". Please write to your lawmakers, no matter whether you are in the US, Europe, China, or elsewhere. Only an international agreement between governments can enforce an AI-Pause and eliminate the necessity to dangerously push the frontier. https://pauseai.info/

butler14

Warming up for that IPO

georgehotz

The world has been recursively self improving for millenia. Similar to scientology, this is a cult pushing sci-fi nonsense. They are just coupled to an LLM lab to give their stories an aire of seriousness. Imagine scientology starting making laptops.

torben-friis

>A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure, as it measures quantity over quality. So 8× lines of code/engineer/day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain. Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration. At Anthropic, we don’t reward people for how many lines of code they write; rather, team members are producing more code simply because they’re using AI systems to write more code. What about the hypothesis that AI is generating more verbose code? I just see the text pretending to acknowledge "LOC != Productivity" and then using it as a metric anyway.

mortenjorck

> today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025. So based on my experience with the verbosity and non-DRYness of LLM code, a solid 2.5x in value delivered. Not bad!

aleqs

Okay, so anthropic has amazing AI which supposedly writes most of their code and can continuously improve... meanwhile they have outages on a regular basis, and any kind of long-running work will now consistently hit 'API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests'. Not sure of this is intentional to force a reduction of token usage, but at this point I need to build around these throttling limits and outages with my own tools to restart/resume sessions. From my experience, in the last 2 weeks, literally 100% of any non-trivial Claude session/work will now be blocked on these issues, requiring manual intervention. One of my focuses now is my own model-agnostic, harness and workflow orchestration (I know everyone is building these) , baselining on opus, and aiming to transition to Chinese models like deepseek in the short term and hopefully open, self hosted models in the future (which I plan to open source). The nonstop marketing fluff from anthropic while their service quality and availability noticeably degrades... just continues to destroy my trust in the company.

SimianSci

Anthropic is looking to IPO here soon. A key aspect of this is to prove profitability. Shifting their focus from Training new models to instead serving inference, they would greatly reduce their spend. In fact this is something being reported on that they are already doing, which is the reason for their first ever profitable quarter. Its awfully convenient that the company which has greatly reduced its spend on training is now asking for a slow down in this area.

reducesuffering

Anthropic has finally come around to what others have already realized far sooner. Little time left now. Notice how shallow the arguments and consistently wrong the AGI naysayers have been year after year. https://intelligence.org/agi-ruin/