Anthropic Institute details progress toward recursive self-improvement in AI R&D

Anthropic's Institute published analysis showing AI systems are already accelerating AI development at the company. As of May 2026 more than 80 percent of code merged into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude, with engineers shipping roughly 8 times as much code per quarter compared with 2021-2025 averages. Success rates on open-ended engineering tasks reached 76 percent by May 2026. The piece frames these trends as progress toward recursive self-improvement, in which AI could fully autonomously design successor systems, while noting the company has not yet reached that threshold and is considering policy updates to retain human control.