Anthropic’s Claude AI is playing an increasingly important role in developing the company’s next generation of artificial intelligence models. 

The company said Claude was leading 26% of its AI research and development work in August, up sharply from just 1% in March, highlighting how AI systems are becoming part of the process of building more advanced AI.

Anthropic has started tracking how much of its internal AI development work is being led or supported by its own models. The company said AI collaborated with humans on more than 90% of its research work in August. However, Claude is not operating fully autonomously in any of the areas measured so far. Human researchers continue to direct, review and oversee the work.

The company said Claude’s contribution has increased rapidly as its capabilities have improved. Anthropic’s latest research also shows that more than 80% of the code merged into its codebase was authored by Claude as of May 2026. 

The company said engineers were merging around eight times as much code per day in the second quarter of 2026 compared with 2024, although it acknowledged that lines of code are not a perfect measure of productivity.

Claude is being used for a growing range of tasks, including writing software, fixing technical problems, running experiments and developing tools. Anthropic said Claude completed more than 800 fixes in April that reduced a particular class of API errors by a factor of 1,000.

The development is part of Anthropic’s broader focus on what it calls “recursive self-improvement”, where AI systems could eventually play a major role in designing and developing their successors. However, the company stressed that fully autonomous AI development has not been achieved and is not inevitable.

Anthropic plans to publish these measurements regularly to provide greater visibility into how quickly AI is contributing to AI development. The move also reflects the growing importance of measuring AI’s role not only as a product for users, but as a tool for advancing the technology itself.

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