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.