Anthropic said on Thursday that its AI model Claude is helping to build a smarter version of itself.

The company said Claude now leads 26% of its model research and development.

This means the model can finish most of a task from a simple instruction.

But humans still watch over it.

Claude cannot yet work fully on its own.

About 90% of Anthropic's research and development happens together with Claude, the company said.

It said the model does large parts of the work, while humans guide it closely.

The share of work Claude leads has grown fast.

It was zero in February.

It reached a quarter of research and development work in August.

Some AI leaders want to slow down the technology because of safety worries.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is one of them.

Anthropic said big AI labs and the public should not know very different things.

It said people need better ways to measure AI development.

It also said labs should report this to the public.

Then society can decide how to use that information.

Anthropic warned that models can speed up their own development.

This could make it harder for humans to understand or control them.

It said sharing these numbers could show how close leading labs are to recursive self-improvement.

That is when a model can build its own successor by itself.

Anthropic asked other developers to share similar numbers often, using a public method.

It did not say how close it thinks it is to that goal.

Anthropic also said it had about 30,000 agents doing research and engineering work as of August.

It recently promised to add outside evaluators to watch over safety.