Anthropic's Claude AI is now driving 26% of the company's research and development, up from nearly zero at the start of the year. The finding demonstrates that AI systems can meaningfully accelerate their own development, with Claude collaborating on roughly 90% of employee work.

• Claude leads 26% of Anthropic's R&D work, a dramatic jump from essentially nothing nine months earlier
• Claude collaborates with human staff on about 90% of their work, suggesting deep integration rather than replacement
• The metric provides concrete evidence that AI can speed up its own development cycle

Mark Zuckerberg criticized Anthropic's push for a global AI slowdown, arguing that companies can manage safety risks on their own without industry-wide pauses. He positioned Meta as already doing this work internally with products like its new Muse agent.

• Zuckerberg said labs have "responsibility and incentive" to train models safely without needing external pressure, contrasting with Amodei's call for a coordinated global slowdown
• Meta delayed releasing Muse for several months to ensure security, which Zuckerberg offered as proof companies can self-regulate
• Zuckerberg took a jab at competitors pursuing "recursive self-improvement" (using AI to develop itself), calling it misguided compared to serving users

Anthropic presents evidence that AI models are increasingly handling the work of building and improving AI systems themselves, with their coding agents now writing 80% of the company's merged code and engineers shipping 8x more code per quarter than in 2024. The article argues this trend could lead to recursive self-improvement—where AI systems autonomously design their own successors—potentially arriving sooner than most institutions expect.

• Claude's task complexity is expanding rapidly: it went from completing 4-minute tasks in March 2024 to 12-hour tasks by mid-2025, with projections suggesting week-long tasks by 2027.
• At Anthropic, Claude now authors over 80% of merged code (up from single digits before February 2025), and the median researcher reports 4x productivity gains when using the system.
• The major remaining gap is judgment and goal-setting: Claude excels at executing specified tasks but still struggles with deciding which problems are worth solving, the final barrier before true autonomous self-improvement.

This article reviews Anthropic’s free Claude Code in Action course, detailing its 15 video lectures, final quiz, and completion certificate. It explains setup, context management, hooks, MCP servers, and GitHub integration, noting its value for both beginners and experienced users.

• Anthropic's free "Claude Code in Action" course (15 videos, ~1 hour, at anthropic.com/learn) gives lifetime access and covers setup through advanced features like hooks, the SDK, MCP servers, and GitHub integration.
• Passing an 8-question final quiz earns a PDF certificate (emailed with name, course title, date, verification number) that can be added to LinkedIn in one click.
• The author scored 7/8 (87%), missing a question on hooks, despite finding the video content easy.