Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic's AI R&D, up from near-zero

Anthropic released a set of metrics tracking Claude's growing role in building its own successors, saying the model now leads 26% of internal AI R&D — a sharp jump from around 1% at the start of the year. On its official account, Anthropic said 'AI systems are getting more powerful, and they're increasingly being used to build the next version of themselves,' and shared three measurements: how much AI R&D is done by AI, how autonomous the work is, and the trajectory over time. The company says Claude collaborates on more than 90% of research tasks, though it stops short of claiming full autonomy on the measured work.

The disclosure is explicitly a public-transparency play: Anthropic wants to 'illuminate that progress for the public' rather than let recursive self-improvement happen behind closed doors. Claude Code lead Boris Cherny framed the arc from Claude Code (developers hand Claude a feature and get shipped code) to Cowork (knowledge workers hand Claude a brief) as proof the same delegation now extends to Anthropic's own model-building.

The reaction landed on the third rail of AI discourse — recursive self-improvement. Commentator Mark Kretschmann wrote 'Claude is now helping build its own successor! This is how recursive self-improvement starts,' capturing widespread unease. Skeptics on r/MachineLearning pushed back on the hype, pointing to a paper showing agents failed to reproduce accepted NeurIPS papers as evidence current systems still lack true autonomous research capability despite strong coding benchmarks. Watch whether Anthropic publishes these figures on a recurring cadence — a rising curve would be one of the most concrete public signals of an RSI feedback loop to date.