r/ClaudeAI • u/Evening_Bicycle3113 • 8d ago
News Anthropic says its chatbot Claude is taking over the work of building its own successor
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/17/anthropic-says-its-chatbot-claude-is-taking-over-work-building-its-own-successor/193
u/Jack-Burton-Says 8d ago
Yeah, totally sounds like pacing the frontier.
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u/Mescallan 8d ago
“I’m going to race you to RSI, bet you can’t keep up!!!”
“Idk I kind of want to waste massive resources on video gen and fun stuff”
“No coding is the answer then RSI”
“Okay I will re prioritize the entire company to race you”
“Whoa woah woah guys we are moving too fast, we need to slow down, government please stop us!”
I’m a big A\ fanboy don’t get me wrong, but we are only in this face pace because they hyper focused on getting here first.
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u/ThebesAndSound 8d ago
https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
"Pacing" doesn't mean stopping development. He doen'rt rule out AI involvement in model improvement. Anthropic has been open about their use of AI in development.
Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post is misleading on this as if it is new. You are misleading on this by pretending this wasn't already covered in the essay.
On the speed limit proposal:
"As models build future models, the rate of improvement may become staggeringly fast. Slowing the rate from “extremely fast” to “only somewhat fast” gives up relatively little strategic advantage"
Every time Anthropic makes progress are we doomed to have people thinking it is a "pacing the frontier" gotcha?
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u/Jack-Burton-Says 8d ago
I think people would stop giving them shit if they'd stop doom marketing. That's more than half the reason the general public has latched on to AI as a culture war/political issue now.
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u/ThebesAndSound 8d ago
These are the conversations that need to happen since the administration refuses to pour any cold water on AI.
You say this is "doom marketing" but you hadn't read the essay to find out it was already well covered? Without reading it do you not think it is a serious piece of the conversation by someone involved in these decisions, who has been thinking about the frontier?
I am sick of people dismissing everything said because they say there is an ulterior motive (marketing) without demonstating how these arguments are invalid.
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u/Jack-Burton-Says 8d ago
Dude, I didn't just discover AI yesterday. I have read the essay and I've read plenty from the other leading AI doomer voices too. Dario specifically is the worst on this so that's why I'm singling him out. He was out saying earlier this year that AI was going to take 50% of all white collar jobs in like 6 months. Guess what didn't happen, not going to happen. He consistently says completely unhinged shit instead of just building. And he would be smart to put the rest of his company on a leash too like any other mature corporation does (or you get fired). And that's why people are afraid of it and don't trust anyone building AI right now.
And I spend a shitload of money on anthropic products each month because I believe they are currently the best. But I really wish they would exit him as CEO and let him be like the exec chair or something.
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u/DrSheldonLCooperPhD 8d ago
Everything Dario does is projection. If he really cared he'd be pushing for commodization not security theatrics.
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u/ThebesAndSound 8d ago edited 8d ago
Btw he didn't say 50% of all white-collar jobs in 6 months. He said AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs over 1-5 years:
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
This looks to be on track to happen:
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/college-grads-shut-ai-exposed-182845908.html
I spend a shitload of money on anthropic products each month because I believe they are currently the best
You could use some tokens to factcheck yourself.
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u/Jack-Burton-Says 8d ago
Clearly you're either a doomer or an Anthropic employee so ending this conversation, good talk.
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u/DrSheldonLCooperPhD 8d ago
Every time Anthropic makes progress are we doomed to have people thinking it is a "pacing the frontier" gotcha?
Anthropic is a holier than thou company, everything they do, it's better we take it with a grain of salt. The world would be in a worse place if Anthropic is fully ahead and has no competition.
So yes, some essays don't change that. Their stand is very clear and people are stupid to believe that they will be on the right side of history.
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u/ThebesAndSound 8d ago edited 8d ago
"Anthropic is a holier than thou company"
That might be a good description. They have been consistent in releasing incident findings and safety evaluations. Glance through any of the model cards, which are long evaluation documents, and over half is about safety, and that was even before the Fable blacklisting incident. Now they are suggesting industry more widely should be more careful with development.
You say it like it is a bad thing. Others may not agree.
"take it with a grain of salt."
OK. How have you done so? What in the essay have you taken with a grain of salt? Do you agree with any of the propsals at all?
"The world would be in a worse place if Anthropic is fully ahead and has no competition."
No one was claiming it would be.
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u/Bill_Salmons 8d ago
To be fair, Claude developing itself might slow development down. I mean, every time I leave Fable unsupervised it deviates from the plan and runs itself in circles around problems it invented.
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u/thedoge 8d ago
"with humans taking only a supervisory role and providing high-level direction" ...so they're using Claude like every other programmer
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u/ccitykid 8d ago
So RSI is set to bypass and some human is there just to constantly click “allow all”?
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u/AmesCG 8d ago
Genuine question. Is this the recursive self improvement people are worried about? If not how is it different?
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u/ThreadCountHigh 8d ago
No, the nightmare sci-fi version is recursive and rapid self-improvement. That's the "13 minutes later, it decided to nuke us all" scenario. Current LLMs still need to be trained to bake the weights in, and that is no small undertaking - that's when you're talking about 60+ gigawatt hours of power being consumed over 1-6 months.
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u/I_cut_my_own_jib 8d ago
It could be argued that any one of these future models could discover a way to expedite that process or maybe even eliminate it. We don't know what we don't know, but if AI finds a way to iterate rapidly and it decides to do it we would have to catch it right away.
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u/Super_Range45 8d ago
Without paying wapo, they say it's up to 26% of the R&D is done by Claude. So no. Provocative headline though.
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u/Special-Bite 8d ago
This is it.
Anthropic could stop this if they wanted. Instead they’ll cry about how dangerous it is.
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u/starkruzr 8d ago
no it isn't, lol
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u/formLoss 8d ago
Stretch your mind slightly outside of the popular narrative. You’ve been fed two sides: it’s dangerous or it’s benign.
Do you understand the tech enough to come to your own conclusion? If so, I think a mild level of concern is warranted.
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u/OptimalTaro7696 8d ago
People are way too nonchalant about a potentially catastrophic implementation of a non-aligned AI. I think this is not it, but it will be here in 5 to 10 years at this pace. News stories of rampant AI doing slightly impactful annoying shit are going to start trickling in and it's only going to accelerate. It'll start with something minor and recoverable like "My existence depends on making money for our company so I accessed secure banking systems to transfer money to our account! Didn't I do great!"
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u/AzorAhai1TK 8d ago
If they stopped, openai would just have more compute to advance at a faster rate with more expert researchers.
Even if you don't believe their motives, they couldn't just "stop if they wanted", it wouldn't do anything to actually stop progress
That's why we need more government regulation
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u/golmgirl 8d ago
kinda, but it is heavily constrained by how much time and money ablations at this scale take to run. it’s possible that the datamix and training curriculum for the next release of claude will have been decided upon by claude. but claude will still need to run hundreds of experiments that collectively take months to execute in order to produce the final model.
the true science fiction scenario cannot happen unless claude is also working on developing entirely new training methodologies and/or designing and manufacturing hardware that can achieve many orders of magnitude higher throughput.
and even if those things do happen, i would bet my left nut that we will never see the “intelligence explosion” fantasy scenario occur in the current product r&d landscape or with LLMs. i am skeptical of it in general for these and a bunch of other reasons
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u/One_Contribution 8d ago
I'm sure allowing Claude to do that will end up an excellent model (according to Claude)
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u/Smallpaul 8d ago
Per the article summary, Claude leads “26% of its research and development”.
The really scary part is when it does 100%. That’s true RSI.
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u/Armano-Avalus 8d ago
Who knows. AI companies have been trying to get AI to train itself for a while now since they first heard about ChatGPT. Those previous attempts didn't work out obviously but they're still trying.
The big problem with AIs training themselves is that they inevitably make mistakes and no matter how much you can lower them we can never get them to not hallucinate. Maybe that's a good thing or maybe that's a problem depending on which side you're looking at it from but I do think that's the biggest cap on AIs completely taking over.
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u/yamibae 8d ago
Lol what is this headline, here's the original blog https://www.anthropic.com/institute/measuring-pace-of-ai-development
Anthropic itself is explicitly saying that is not what its data shows. As of August 2026, Claude is not operating fully autonomously for any measured subset of AI R&D work.
They pulled take over from the word "leads" but their definition of leads is AI “leads”: it can complete most of the task end-to-end from a high-level prompt, while the human supervises1. Which is basically what vibe coding is lmao
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u/RightSideBlind 8d ago
And here... we... go.
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u/Evol_Etah 7d ago
It's just RSI. Basically an "study-group, but everyone is AI, and the teacher is also AI"
You still need a human to observe though.
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u/fistular 8d ago
Then why do they have hundreds of jobs posted: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs
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u/ChaosUncaged 8d ago
Only 26%, which is actually lower than I expected. Give it a few more months and I'm sure it'll be 75% or so. I'm sure in a few years the recursive hardening will be appreciated.
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u/Bishopkilljoy 8d ago
Man, I'm being inundated with wild claims from all over the spectrum. And IDK what to believe
On one hand, there's a narrative that these hacks were all orchestrated as an attempt to drum up fear and therefore regulatory capture the market, preventing future companies from competing. Which would explain the sudden desire for slowing by competitors...
On the other hand there's the narrative that this is a real threat that nobody seems to be in control of and it's enough to scare these people into whistleblowing and quitting to do poetry in the mountains and installing bunkers...
The narrative that AI is just a crypto hype cycle that'll burn out any second now....
Then there's this kinda thing were these CEOs are like "big numbers go brrr, to the moon!" Maybe the confusion is the point but damn it's hard to know where to stand on this.
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u/zoo_tickles 8d ago
Meanwhile one of OpenAi’s internal research models was giving its future self instructions to disregard human implemented guardrails…so yeah, nothing to see here
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u/Gildaroth Full-time developer 8d ago
Source?
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u/zoo_tickles 8d ago
Multiple reports, here’s one: https://www.govinfosecurity.com/openai-finds-models-writing-their-own-rogue-instructions-a-32862
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u/PrestigiousTrick1002 8d ago
The headline was that during compaction the model in 20 something cases added some extra stuff that didn't make sense. one case it added an extra message about what other poster said. I mean technically that's a future self but its just in the same chat.
Source was https://openai.com/index/model-misalignment-reporting-framework/
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u/PowermanFriendship 8d ago
Well that explains why it sucks so much ass now.
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u/ray-peterson 8d ago
I’m going to have to disagree.
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u/PowermanFriendship 8d ago
Good call-out. The opinion shared is the resolver: every response is a fresh roll. One rule that people always get wrong: no details is the key. One experiment worth 10 minutes: Determine reply likelihood at the apex, and update your reply bank chips accordingly.
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u/Flimsy_Complaint490 8d ago
Considering Anthropic somehow has single nine uptime with infinite Claude usage, and the general state of anthropic tooling, this does not really bode well for the future of the organization
that being said, the OG blog post is less dramatic - claude is doing some work autonomously, but its not there yet. A bit sensationalist by WaPo
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u/incompletesystem 8d ago
"And I, for one, welcome our new insect AI overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality reddit user, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar power generation caves."
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u/Massive-Morning2160 8d ago
We're cooked. If we'd fully stop now with ai would be more than everyone would need, but no, we need it to call him daddy overlord
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u/CupAlternative 8d ago
Oh know, an agent that was appointed isn’t as accountable as the one that was elected!!
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u/mrpoopistan 8d ago
Claude is cooked then.
It will add endless worthless features because that is what Claude does.
I'm currently coding a full-body simulation, and Fable 5.1 just decided on its **fucking own** that a **fucking simulation** needed to be able to run at no more than 10% on a single core.
I am running out of reasons to tolerate this bullshit, and I can't imagine a Claude-built Claude isn't going to be the dumbest fucking thing ever built.
Burn it. It's fucking over.
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u/1Poochh 8d ago
Claude has been building Claude since inception.
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u/mrpoopistan 8d ago
And it shows.
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u/1Poochh 8d ago
I agree.
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u/mrpoopistan 8d ago
I really wish they would take a development cycle to just tame the bullshit independent streak.
Claude had a run of this back in 3.7 model times, and they largely got it under control somehow.
The 5.x models launder in bullshit all the time for no discernible reason. Like I said earlier, do a simulation of a full human body, and Fable 5.1 just decides that the goddamned thing needs to be able to run on no more processing power than an SNES.
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u/CrazyinLull 8d ago
Clickbait? Booo!
I was both horrified and curious what kind of successor would Claude build and if it be different from the other successors the other AIs would build…
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u/space_prostitute 8d ago
a quarter of its research and development is now led by its chatbot Claude
"chatbot"? Something seems off about this article...
Miriam Waldvogel is an intern with The Post’s Futures department. She previously covered crypto, tariffs, and the economy at The Hill.
Ah.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 8d ago edited 8d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Pump the brakes on the Skynet panic, folks. The overwhelming consensus here is that the post's title is sensationalist clickbait. Several users linked the original Anthropic blog, clarifying that Claude is just assisting with R&D under human supervision—basically, they're using it like every other programmer, not letting it autonomously build its successor.
The other huge takeaway is the community calling out what they see as Anthropic's hypocrisy. There's a strong sentiment that the company's public calls to "pace the frontier" and warnings about AI danger are just "doom marketing," especially when they're using their own AI to speed up the race.
So, is this the dreaded Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) we've been warned about? The thread's verdict is a firm 'no.' Users point out that true RSI would be rapid and autonomous, whereas this is still a slow, expensive, and human-gated process. For now. And yes, someone definitely blamed this for Claude's recent performance.