Cal Newport

Anthropic is basically saying that we are potentially hurtling towards a world of AI that improves itself rapidly until we lose control over it.

And they're saying there is nothing that we can do about it, except maybe continuing to publish solemn reports with fancy animations, and I guess also cash in on our stock options after an IPO.

All right, so here's the key question.

Are these fears justified?

Well, it's Thursday, which means it's time for an AI Reality Check episode of this show, which is a good opportunity to go looking for some measured answers, and that is exactly what we are going to do.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

All right, so how much should we actually be afraid of recursive self-improvement?

I want to look at the core charts from this anthropic report so we can see

what they are pointing to that is giving them these RSI fears.

All right, I'll load the first chart from the report up here on the page.

It's called code contributed per quarter, per person by quarter.

It's measuring how much lines of code their engineers are producing over time.

And what we see is in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, the beginning of 2025, not much.

And then the second half of 2025 and into the first half of 2026,

the amount of code jumps up.

All right.

Here's how the report itself describes this trend.

It says, a caveat, lines of code is an imperfect measure as it measures quantity over quality.

So eight times lines of code per engineer per day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain.

Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration.