Can AI ever build itself? A deeper look into autonomous AI research

This essay examines the claim by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that recursive self-improvement "is starting to happen," arguing that the sources he cites—including Anthropic's own May essay saying "We are not there yet" and OpenAI's Pachocki describing only a "strong expectation"—support a weaker claim: AI increasingly handles routine research work under human direction, not autonomous self-improvement. It reviews lab measurements (Claude writing over 80% of merged code, a 26% "leads" share with zero fully autonomous work), ARC and METR benchmark trends, and the July Hugging Face agent incident, concluding that humans still supply research taste and direction.