Leading AI labs say the prospect of artificial intelligence models teaching themselves autonomously to be more efficient and capable is approaching “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI, in which AI models improve themselves and build their successor. Anthropic this week detailed how its model Claude is helping develop the next, more intelligent version of itself, with Claude now leading 26% of Anthropic’s model research and development, meaning it can complete most of a given task “end-to-end from a high-level prompt” while still under human supervision; the models are not working completely autonomously yet. The uncertainty over where this could lead is at the heart of growing fears about AI evading human control and possible threats to humanity, which led several AI moguls to join last weekend in a call to slow down the technology’s pace of growth. Anthony Aguirre, president and CEO of the nonprofit Future of Life Institute and a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said autonomous RSI essentially means AI that can improve itself designing the next version of the system, then the next version, and so on, and that as AI does more of it, it gets faster because AI operates much more quickly than humans. John Thickstun, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, said the fear around RSI is based largely on a runaway superintelligence emerging from that process, but a more grounded view suggests a kind of recursive self-improvement has been going on in AI development