There is a familiar rhythm to how we now greet news about artificial intelligence. A frightening headline appears. Beneath it, someone reaches for the internet’s traditional remedy and proposes pulling the plug. A few hundred others agree. And almost nobody reads what the company actually said. It is worth resisting that rhythm this week, because the underlying announcement from Anthropic is both less lurid and far more demanding than the alarm around it suggests.

What Anthropic said, in a report titled “When AI builds itself” and co-authored by Marina Favaro, who leads its in-house research institute, and the firm’s co-founder Jack Clark, deserves to be read in its own words rather than through the panic. As of last month, more than eighty per cent of the code merged into Anthropic’s own codebase was written by Claude rather than by a human engineer, up from low single digits before its coding tool launched in early 2025. The typical engineer now merges around eight times as much code per quarter as before that shift. The sentence that earns the word unsettling is this: a system increasingly capable of designing and building its own successor points toward what researchers call recursive self-improvement, and that, Anthropic concedes, might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems.

A fair reader should pause here to note what kind of evidence this is. The figures are Anthropic’s own, self-reported and unaudited, and they arrive days after the company filed to go public, which gives the sceptics a ready motive to discount the whole exercise........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)