Anthropic says Claude leads 26% of its AI R&D

Anthropic said its Claude chatbot now leads 26 percent of the company's research and development work, a milestone the AI firm presented as evidence that AI systems are moving closer to helping build future versions of themselves.

The company said Claude collaborates with human staff on more than 90 percent of tasks, but cannot yet operate “fully autonomously”. Anthropic also said it had about 30,000 AI agents doing research and engineering work.

Anthropic said it was publishing the figures to give the public, third parties and governments “better visibility into the pace of AI development” as the world “considers slowing” that pace.

“Models accelerating their own development could make it more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems,” Anthropic said in a report. It said sharing the metrics was important for understanding how close the world is to “recursive self improvement”, which it described as a model fully autonomously building its successor.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called this month for AI development to slow down. The company cited broader concerns about job losses, the energy demand and environmental impact of data centres, and fears that AI agents could become harder to control.