Anthropic urges option to slow frontier AI development

Researchers at The Anthropic Institute, the company's research arm, said in a blog post that AI is accelerating the creation of new models so quickly it could eventually help build its own successors. "We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology," the company wrote.

Anthropic pointed to internal data showing more than 80% of the code merged into its codebase is now written by Claude, and that the typical engineer merged eight times as much code per day in the second quarter of 2026 as in 2024. One employee said there are days when everything goes so well they "can't help but think nothing I do matters," while another said it had been roughly five months since they last wrote any code themselves.

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