Nathaniel Whittemore

Now to do a little bit of upfront contextualization, here's how Ethan Malek framed the Anthropic piece when AI builds itself.

He said, I think it is really worth reading this piece on RSI at Anthropic.

There's a bit of navel gazing, some marketing, and a lot of very sincere beliefs about what Anthropic thinks is likely in the near future of AI that you probably want to be aware of.

The big theme of the piece is RSI or recursive self-improvement.

And what Anthropic is pointing to at core is an inflection point moment coming very quickly around how the next best AI gets built.

Anthropic writes, For most of AI's history, humans drove every step in its development cycle.

But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work.

Taken far enough and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor.

This is called recursive self-improvement.

We're not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable, but it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

Now, a lot of what you're going to see on social media from this is big surprising numbers.

For example, they write, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021 to 2025.

Another big number is 80%.

That is the percentage of Claude's production code that is authored by Claude itself.

They also note that, as they put it, the code that Claude writes is good and improving.

Good code, they say, means two things.

It works and is written in a manner that allows another engineer to understand it and build upon it.

On the first criterion, they say, the evidence is clear.

The rate at which anthropic staff correct, redirect, or take over mid-task from Claude has been falling steadily for a year, including on the most complex and open-ended tasks.

This means problems with no clear specification, where the engineer isn't sure what the answer looks like.