AI models smarter than humans?

Anthropic reveals Claude now leads a quarter of its own R&D — and the company wants rivals to disclose the same

Anthropic disclosed that its AI model Claude went from zero research contribution in February to leading 26% of the company's own development work by August, a pace that even the company admits could make future AI systems harder for humans to control.

The San Francisco, based AI lab published a blog post Thursday laying out metrics it says no other major AI company has shared publicly. Claude, Anthropic's flagship model, now handles roughly a quarter of the company's model research and development "end-to-end from a high-level prompt", meaning the AI completes most of a given task on its own, with human engineers supervising rather than directing each step.

Beyond that top-line figure, approximately 90% of all Anthropic R&D now involves Claude in some collaborative role, performing what the company describes as "large chunks of work under close human direction."

Six months ago, that number was zero. The trajectory raises a question Anthropic itself flagged in its disclosure: how close are leading AI labs to the point where their models can recursively improve themselves, building smarter successors faster than any human team could?

The company acknowledged the risk plainly. Models accelerating their own development, Anthropic wrote, could make it "more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems." That is not a hypothetical warning from an outside critic. It is a statement from the company building the system in question.

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