Inside the Race to Make AI Build Itself

Jack Clark, Anthropic’s co-founder, left on paternity leave last November. When he returned in February, he was surprised to learn that colleagues hardly wrote code anymore. They managed five or six copies of the company’s AI, Claude, which sometimes managed several more Claudes. To Clark, this looked like an early form of something the field has anticipated and feared for decades: recursive self-improvement, or the point at which AI begins to accelerate its own development. First, the thinking goes, models make researchers faster, but as each improvement feeds the next, the models take over more of the research cycle. Years of progress compress into months—leaving society with little time to absorb the consequences, from job disruption to engineered pathogens. Taken to its limit, AI could improve itself without humans, triggering a runaway loop long known as an "intelligence explosion," where machines rapidly advance beyond human understanding, and possibly beyond human control.Clark believed the world needed to confront this prospect. He posted a flurry of blog posts on recursive self-improvement and flew home to England to deliver a talk on the topic in May, then led an Anthropi...