The concept that AIs can build better AIs, creating an accelerating feedback loop, is no longer theoretical. Leaders from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind have publicly confirmed they are actively using current AI models to develop the next generation, making RSI a practical engineering pursuit.

Anthropic's AI, Claude, now writes 80% of the company's production code, a dramatic increase signaling a shift in AI development. This moves the primary human contribution away from writing code to higher-level tasks like defining problems, judging results, and exercising 'research taste,' fundamentally changing the engineer's role.

The idea of AI improving itself is already a reality at Anthropic. Over 90% of their internal code, including code for the Claude Code tool itself, is written by AI. This internal use of their own frontier models is a key driver of their accelerating development pace.

Unlike any prior tool, AI can be directly applied to improve its own creation. It designs more efficient computer chips, writes better training code, and automates research, creating a recursive self-improvement loop that rapidly outpaces human oversight and control.

AI labs deliberately targeted coding first not just to aid developers, but because AI that can write code can help build the next, smarter version of itself. This creates a rapid, self-reinforcing cycle of improvement that accelerates the entire field's progress.

Since late 2023, the Claude Code application has been developed entirely by the AI itself. This is a concrete, real-world example of a self-improving system, a key milestone on the path toward more advanced AI.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not just building better models; their strategic goal is an "automated AI researcher." The ability for an AI to accelerate its own development is viewed as the key to getting so far ahead that no competitor can catch up.

A key strategy for labs like Anthropic is automating AI research itself. By building models that can perform the tasks of AI researchers, they aim to create a feedback loop that dramatically accelerates the pace of innovation.

AI firm Anthropic reveals its AI, Claude, now writes over 80% of its merged codebase. This trend of "recursive self-improvement," where AI builds its successors, is a preview of how AI will automate complex tasks across all professions, not just software development.