Will AI models achieve the ability to improve autonomously ...

Let's savour the number first: Anthropic says Claude now leads more than a quarter of its research work. Not assists, not drafts — leads. That's a quarter of the research shop at the company named after the word 'anthropic' being run by the thing it built, and the framing offered is not alarm but a status update, delivered with the calm of a man telling you the boiler's been making that noise for months and it's probably fine. A quarter is also the strangest milestone to advertise — it's the bit of the sentence you'd keep quiet about, in the way you'd keep quiet about a quarter of your driving being done by the dog.

The phrase to watch is 'recursive self-improvement,' which the labs have wrapped in 'increasingly automated yet supervised.' Supervised is doing heroic labour there. Supervised by whom, exactly, and on what timescale, and with what authority to say stop — because the supervisor, in every version of this announced so far, is the same organisation that gets paid if the model finishes the loop. OpenAI, xAI and Microsoft have each unveiled competing visions, which is a nice way of saying four firms are racing to automate the thing that makes them competitive, and all four have promised to keep a hand on the wheel.

The LA Times headline asks whether models will get there. The labs have answered: near. That is a claim from the party selling the tickets, and it doubles as a fundraising document and a capability demo. The genuinely useful thing about recursive self-improvement is that if it arrives, nobody will need the press release; if it doesn't, the press release was the product all along. The supervision question, meanwhile, gets filed in the drawer marked later, alongside every other supervision question of the past three years.