(Washington Stand) For most of the AI revolution, one assumption held: human beings were building ever more capable machines. That assumption no longer holds.
Anthropic disclosed this week that Claude now leads 26% of the company’s AI research and development work, up from less than 1% in February, completing most tasks from a high-level prompt while a human supervises. Anthropic says Claude is not autonomously building its successor, but published the figures because AI helping build more powerful AI could make advanced systems harder for people to understand or control.
That is where this month’s Five Lenses begins. Each month I examine artificial intelligence through five dimensions: capability, control, competition, capacity, and consequences. This month, one thread runs through all five: AI is no longer just advancing, it has begun to participate in the process that advances it.