Anthropic’s Claude is helping to build the next version of itself

Anthropic’s Claude is helping the company develop the next, more intelligent version of the model, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab said in an announcement on Thursday.

Claude is leading 26 per cent of Anthropic’s model research and development, which the company said means that it can complete most of a given task “end-to-end from a high-level prompt” while still being under human supervision. The model is not yet working completely autonomously.

Still, about 90 per cent of the company’s research and development is done in “collaboration” with Claude, which Anthropic said means that the model can do “large chunks of work under close human direction”.

The announcement came as some leading figures in AI, led in large part by Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns.

As leaders consider pacing AI’s development, “we should do everything possible to minimise the gap between what frontier labs know and what the public knows”, the company said in a blog post. “This means better measuring the development of AI, reporting on it publicly, and giving society an opportunity to decide how to use this information”.

The company said that models accelerating their own development could make it “more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems”. It argued that sharing these metrics could lead to better understanding of how close leading AI labs are to reaching recursive self-improvement or a model’s ability to autonomously build its successor.

Anthropic also urged other AI developers to share similar metrics on a regular basis, encouraging the use of a public methodology so the numbers could be compared over time and potentially across labs.

It was unclear from Anthropic’s disclosure how close the company believes it is to achieving recursive self-improvement, but the pace at which Claude has increasingly contributed to research and development is notable. The portion of work Claude “leads” or does in large part while remaining under human supervision was none in February. Six months later, it was leading a quarter of research and development work, reaching that benchmark in August.

The company also shared details of agent oversight measures it has in place, noting that there were approximately 30,000 agents doing research and engineering work as of August. Oversight measures are crucial for seeing how often agent misbehaviour is detected by monitoring systems, the company said. Anthropic recently committed to setting up external third-party evaluators who will be embedded within the company to monitor safety efforts.

An Anthropic researcher kicked off much of the recent dialogue around AI safety when he resigned last week with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity. Amodei, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other tech leaders have since supported the idea of slowing down development, but other tech leaders and President Donald Trump have pushed back.

– AP