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Anthropic's Self-Improvement Claim: Claude Writes Its Own Code
At 14:22 · chapter starts 11:40
Leo walks through Anthropic's remarkable internal data: engineers are shipping eight times as much code per quarter as in 2021 [1] — Leo Laporte "Claude authors 80%+ of its own code: As of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude — up fro…" 12:37 , and as of May 2026, more than 80% of merged code is written by Claude. The success rate on open-ended problems has rocketed from below 20% before December 2025 to over 70% after Mythos launched [1] — Leo Laporte "Claude authors 80%+ of its own code: As of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude — up fro…" 12:37 . Fr. Robert raises an important methodological objection — counting commits was famously gamed at Twitter/X under Musk, and the same incentive to inflate metrics could apply here. Jeff Jarvis points out that success rates are measured against moving targets, making the data hard to interpret objectively. The panel reaches a shared suspicion: the timing of this paper, right before an IPO filing, is not coincidental. Leo does not fully dismiss it — the rapid model release cadence from all major labs suggests something real is accelerating.
As of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic's codebase was authored by Claude — up from low single digits before February 2025.
Claude's success rate on open-ended problems soared from below 20% before December 2025 to well above 70% after the release of Opus 4.5/Mythos.
Fr. Robert Ballecer invokes Charlie Munger's maxim — 'show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes' — to explain why calls for an AI pause are performative. The race to build the first fully functional AGI has no second-place prize, making any genuine pause structurally impossible regardless of rhetoric.
