The company that just a few weeks ago told us that its Mythos model was too powerful to be released publicly is now saying that we might need to hit the pause button on AI altogether, while also teaching its AI to build itself. On June 4, Anthropic published a report, when AI builds itself, showing that Claude now writes more than 80% of the code merged into its own production codebase, up from the low single digits before Claude Code reached research preview in February last year, and arguing that the loop has begun to accelerate AI development in a way that could eventually leave humans unable to control the systems being built.
The Anthropic Institute, the firm's research arm, casts the trend as early movement toward recursive self-improvement, the point at which a model designs and builds its own successor without meaningful human input, and warns that the rare misalignment in today's models could keep "growing more frequent but less understood until we lose control of them."