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 are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important.2021–2023Building the first ClaudeIn the early days, work at Anthropic looked like work at any other tech company: people writing code and docs on laptops.2023–2025ChatbotsPeople used early chatbots to help with parts of the process, like generating short code snippets and copying the output into text editors.2025–2026Coding agentsAs the agents became more capable, they were able to write and edit code on their own, sometimes entire files.TodayAutonomous agentsAgents can now run code themselves and delegate hours of work to other agents.20XX?Closing the loopIn the fu