Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027

Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic and author of the Import AI newsletter, now believes recursive self-improvement could become possible as early as 2027, having previously expected 2028, citing progress in mathematical breakthroughs and benchmarks such as TasteVal. TasteVal, from P-Zero Research, measures research taste as compute efficiency across eight fixed AI research tasks, and found Anthropic's Opus 5.5 reached expert-level scores with a compute multiplier of 2.3, though the statistical range runs from 1.15 to 4.37. The benchmark tests experiment design and result interpretation but not the choice of research direction, and its authors admit results may overstate how quickly research taste is improving.