Anthropic published a remarkable paper this week called “When AI Builds Itself.” Their engineers now ship roughly eight times more code per quarter than they did in 2024. More than 80% of the code merged into Anthropic’s codebase is written by Claude, up from low single digits before Claude Code launched in February 2025.
The most interesting data point comes from independent research organization METR. Their benchmarks show the length of tasks frontier AI models can complete reliably is now doubling every four months, down from every seven months just a year ago. In practical terms, AI systems that could handle tasks measured in minutes two years ago can now complete tasks that take hours.
In one example, Claude generated approximately 800 bug-fix pull requests that reduced a class of API errors by a factor of one thousand. The engineer who supervised the work estimated it would have taken a human several years to achieve the same result.
Back in December, OpenAI published its thoughts on recursive self-improvement (AI systems capable of helping build future AI systems). Anthropic is now describing something very similar: AI is increasingly helping develop AI, and they expect the pace of improvement to accelerate.
Applying this to your own business will require a few assumptions. Assume Anthropic’s results are 50% better than you can do without their engineering team and their tools. How will headcount and budgets have to change if your tech teams become 4x more productive? How will workflows have to change as coders transition from “writing the thing” to “reviewing the thing a model wrote”? And, of course, how will you create a culture of continuous adaptation so that your organization does not fall behind?
Most of my time is spent helping business leaders work through questions like these. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat.
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Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.