Anthropic’s AI now handles 26% of core R&D work, report says

The White House-aligned tech adviser singled out the Claude maker as the company doing the most to build AI that improves itself David Sacks has named the AI lab he believes is running fastest toward machines that build better machines. In a post on X, Sacks said Anthropic is doing more than any other company to achieve full recursive self-improvement, or RSI. Coming from Sacks, that sentence can be read in more than one way. He chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and he has spent recent weeks publicly questioning how Anthropic trains its models. What RSI actually means, and where Anthropic says it stands In the technical version, the goal is AI that can autonomously improve its own capabilities, which could compound into rapid acceleration. Anthropic’s September 2026 report flagged exactly that possibility, describing RSI as a path toward autonomous AI improvement and faster capability gains. The same report put numbers on how far along the company is. AI systems now handle 26% of Anthropic’s core R&D work. In February, that share was less than 1%. The report also stated that over 90% of Anthropic’s R&D activities now run at what it calls ...