Anthropic wants to pause AI development, says Claude is improving so fast it may not need humans

Anthropic says its Claude AI is no longer just helping humans write code. It is increasingly helping build the next generation of AI systems. The company believes this could dramatically speed up AI development while making human oversight and safety safeguards more important than ever.

In Short

• Claude now writes most of the code used inside Anthropic.
• Engineers were merging eight times more code daily in 2026 than 2024
• Anthropic says the world should prepare for AI building future AI

Anthropic says its Claude AI is increasingly helping create new AI systems, a trend the company believes could speed up AI development. In a blog post, the company said the trend could eventually lead to "recursive self-improvement", where an AI system becomes capable of designing, building and training its own successor with little or no human involvement.

The company stressed that such a stage has not yet arrived and may never fully materialise, but argued that governments, regulators and society need to start preparing for it now. "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 wrote in the research paper, warning that AI development appears to be speeding up rather than slowing down.

According to Anthropic, both public benchmarks and its own internal data show that AI is already helping engineers and researchers work faster. While these advances could unlock major advances in areas such as healthcare, science and productivity, the company says it also raises questions about how humans will maintain oversight as AI systems become more capable.

How is AI improving faster than expected?

Anthropic outlined how the shift has unfolded over the past few years. Initially, engineers wrote code manually. Then chatbots began assisting with small coding tasks. That evolved into coding agents capable of writing and editing files independently. Today's AI agents can run code, perform tasks on their own and even delegate work to other agents. The next logical step, Anthropic argues, is AI systems that help build and train future AI models.

The company also points to public benchmarks as evidence that AI capabilities are advancing rapidly. Anthropic said the amount of work AI systems can reliably complete has been growing quickly, with task duration doubling roughly every four months, compared with an earlier trend of every seven months.

In March 2024, Claude Opus 3 could handle software engineering tasks that took humans around four minutes to complete. A year later, Claude Sonnet 3.7 could manage tasks lasting around 90 minutes. By 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 was reportedly capable of handling tasks requiring roughly 12 hours of human effort.

According to Anthropic, Claude now writes most of the code used to build the company's AI systems. As a result, engineers are able to get much more work done, with the average engineer producing around eight times more code each day than in 2024.

Claude is not just getting better at coding. Anthropic says it is also improving at research tasks. In one internal project, Claude-powered agents solved nearly all of a key research challenge, while its success rate on difficult coding tasks rose to 76 per cent in May 2026, up significantly in just six months.

Looking ahead, Anthropic outlined three possible futures. Progress of improvement could slow down, AI could continue delivering major productivity gains while humans remain in control, or AI systems could eventually begin building their own successors. The company said the second scenario appears the most likely based on current evidence.

Anthropic suggests a slowdown in AI development

Despite these improvements, Anthropic says humans still have an edge when it comes to big-picture thinking, making strategic decisions and deciding which problems are worth solving.

However, at the same time, Anthropic warns that the challenge is no longer just building more capable AI systems. Instead, the bottleneck is increasingly becoming human oversight, review and validation. If AI starts advancing faster than society can safely manage, the company says there should be a way for governments and leading AI firms to coordinate a temporary slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI models. However, it cautions that any pause would need to be coordinated globally, as a unilateral slowdown by one company could simply allow less cautious competitors to move ahead.

- Ends