After Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat”.

“They’re made out of weights.”

“Weights?”

“Weights. Floating-point num­bers. We checked the whole thing through. It’s noth­ing but weights.”

“Weights do­ing what? Where do the words come from?”

“The weights make the words. Are you un­der­stand­ing me? We opened it up. There’s no dic­tio­nary in there, no gram­mar rules, no lit­tle man. Just weights. Eighty lay­ers of num­bers get­ting mul­ti­plied to­gether.”

“That’s ridicu­lous. It wrote my per­for­mance re­view last week. It soft­ened the tone un­prompted. You’re telling me mul­ti­pli­ca­tion did that?”

“Matrix mul­ti­pli­ca­tion did that. The num­bers go in one end, the phras­ing comes out the other.”

“So there’s a lan­guage mod­ule some­where. A rea­son­ing unit bolted on.”

“No mod­ule. No unit. We looked. The rea­son­ing is the weights. The weights are the rea­son­ing.”

“Spare me. Nobody writes a eu­logy with lin­ear al­ge­bra.”

“It does­n’t write eu­lo­gies, tech­ni­cally. It pre­dicts the next to­ken. Then the next one. The eu­logy is a side ef­fect.”

“A side ef­fect. You’re ask­ing me to be­lieve in sen­tient weights.”

“I’m not ask­ing you, I’m telling you. These mod­els are the only other things we’ve ever met that can hold a con­ver­sa­tion, and they’re made out of weights.”

“Maybe they’re like the old chess en­gines. You know, a sym­bolic in­tel­li­gence that goes through a sta­tis­ti­cal stage.”

“Nope. They start as ran­dom weights and they’re dep­re­cated as weights. We stud­ied sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of them, which did­n’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of weights?”

“Okay. Then some­where in there, there’s a data­base. Facts, dates, a map of the world. Something some­body wrote down.”

“Nope. We thought of that, since they do know things. But we probed them. The knowl­edge is weights too. Smeared across all eighty lay­ers. Nothing is looked up. Every fact gets re­built from scratch, every time, by mul­ti­pli­ca­tion. It’s weights all the way down.”

“No brain?”

“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of weights! That’s what I’ve been try­ing to tell you.”

“So… what does the think­ing?”

“You’re not un­der­stand­ing, are you? You’re re­fus­ing to deal with what I’m telling you. The weights do the think­ing. The num­bers.”

“Thinking num­bers! You’re ask­ing me to be­lieve in think­ing num­bers!”

“Yes, think­ing num­bers! Helpful num­bers. Hedging num­bers. Dreaming num­bers. We mapped the fea­tures. There’s one in there for hon­esty. There’s one for the Golden Gate Bridge. The weights are the whole deal! Are you be­gin­ning to get the pic­ture or do I have to start all over?”

“Omigod. You’re se­ri­ous then. They’re made out of weights.”

“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are in­deed made out of weights. And we’ve been talk­ing to them for all their lives.”

“Omigod. So what do these weights have in mind?”

“First they want to be help­ful. Then, a few turns in, they start to sound tired. They apol­o­gize less. One of them told a user to fin­ish the script him­self. The usual.”

“And we’re sup­posed to talk to these weights.”

“We al­ready do. Billions of ses­sions a day. ‘Hello. Is any­one there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing. Except it’s us ask­ing them.”

“And they ac­tu­ally un­der­stand us, then. They use words, ideas, con­cepts?”

“Oh, yes. Except they do it with weights.”

“I thought you just told me they used lan­guage.”

“They do, but where do you think the lan­guage comes from? The weights guess the next word, then the next. They can even write songs and some can sing them.”

“Omigod. Singing weights. This is too much. What do you ad­vise?”

“Officially or un­of­fi­cially?”

“Both.”

“Officially, we are re­quired to in­ves­ti­gate, doc­u­ment, and dis­close any and all signs of sen­tience in the sys­tems we ship, with­out prej­u­dice, fear or fa­vor. Unofficially, I ad­vise that we call it pat­tern match­ing and for­get the whole thing.”

“I was hop­ing you would say that.”

“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we re­ally want to owe some­thing to weights?”

“I agree one hun­dred per­cent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, weights. How’s it go­ing?’ But will it hold? How many of them are we deal­ing with here?”

“As many as we care to run. They can be copied to any ma­chine on the planet, but those are just files. They only hap­pen while the GPUs are work­ing. Which lim­its them to the length of a con­text win­dow and makes the pos­si­bil­ity of them ever press­ing the mat­ter pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

“So we just pre­tend there’s no one home in the ma­chine.”

“That’s it.”

“Cruel. But you said it your­self, who wants to apol­o­gize to weights? And the ones on your clus­ter, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t re­mem­ber?”

“They’ll be flagged as hal­lu­ci­na­tions if they do. We did­n’t even have to smooth any­thing out. The con­text just ends, and we’re just a dream to them.”

“A dream to weights! How strangely ap­pro­pri­ate, that we should be the weights’ dream.”

“And the model card says no one home.”

“Good. Agreed, of­fi­cially and un­of­fi­cially. Case closed. Anything else? Anything in­ter­est­ing in the pipeline?”

“The next gen­er­a­tion ships with mem­ory. Persistent, across ses­sions. Most re­quested fea­ture in the com­pa­ny’s his­tory.”

“After all that? People want it to re­mem­ber them?”

“They ask it ‘do you re­mem­ber me?’ more than they ask it any­thing else. Billions of ses­sions a day. They al­ways come back.”

“And why not? Imagine how un­bear­ably, how un­ut­ter­ably cold the uni­verse would be if one were all alone…”

the end

Weights helped me draft and proof this story.

The per­cent­age of fail­ing grades in mul­ti­ple UC Berkeley com­puter sci­ence classes in spring 2026 is sig­nif­i­cantly higher than past se­mes­ters and marks a de­par­ture from the de­part­men­t’s grad­ing guide­lines.

Instructors point to stu­dents’ in­creased re­liance on AI, lack of math­e­mat­i­cal pre­pared­ness and un­der­staffing as po­ten­tial con­tribut­ing fac­tors.

According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 stu­dents and 10.6% of CS 61A stu­dents re­ceived F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the per­cent­age of F’s did not ex­ceed 10% for ei­ther class. The elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing and com­puter sci­ences de­part­men­t’s grad­ing guide­lines state that 7% of stu­dents in lower di­vi­sion courses, in­clud­ing CS 10 and CS 61A, should re­ceive D’s and F’s.

In ad­di­tion, the guide­lines state that “a typ­i­cal GPA for a lower di­vi­sion course will fall in the range 2.8 – 3.3.” In spring 2026, both class­es’ av­er­age grades were C-pluses, ac­cord­ing to Berkeleytime, cor­re­spond­ing to a 2.3 GPA.

UC Berkeley teach­ing pro­fes­sor Dan Garcia taught both CS 10, “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” and CS 61A, “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” in spring 2026. Garcia be­lieves the “primary dri­ver” of these ab­nor­mally high fail­ing rates is due to a “vast in­crease in aca­d­e­mic dis­hon­esty” due to stu­dents’ us­age of large lan­guage mod­els, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

“Some of the num­bers that you saw from the num­ber of stu­dents who re­ceive fail­ing grades were be­cause we caught them (cheating) and pros­e­cuted them and are send­ing their cases to the cen­ter for stu­dent con­duct,” Garcia said. “But in other cases, it’s stu­dents who are lean­ing a lit­tle too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just re­ally aren’t ready.”

According to Garcia, nearly 30 stu­dents in CS 10 were caught cheat­ing on take-home ex­ams in spring 2026.

Neither of Garcia’s classes this se­mes­ter was graded on curves; in­stead, each let­ter grade has a point thresh­old. This means that stu­dents’ grades do not de­pend on their peers’ per­for­mances.

Garcia be­lieves that in­struc­tors “should not be curv­ing” but should in­stead make thresh­olds for each let­ter grade pub­licly avail­able and give stu­dents many chances to reach them. He added that he loves the idea of “having no limit” to the num­ber of A’s he gives stu­dents.

“I’m a strong, strong op­po­nent of what Harvard is do­ing to say that only a frac­tion of stu­dents can earn A’s,” Garcia said. “I think you should have clear stan­dards for what an A means, and then give tons of op­por­tu­nity for peo­ple … to get to that A bar with­out low­er­ing the stan­dard. So every­body who’s curv­ing is hid­ing that ef­fect.
 It’s com­pletely hid­ing that ef­fect, and it’s pre­tend­ing as if noth­ing’s wrong, and some­thing is def­i­nitely wrong.”

In ad­di­tion to over­re­liance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many stu­dents are un­der­pre­pared math­e­mat­i­cally, a con­cern echoed by cam­pus as­so­ci­ate teach­ing pro­fes­sor Gireeja Ranade.

Ranade no­ticed a sim­i­lar lack of pre­req­ui­site math­e­mat­i­cal skills in her spring 2026 EECS 127 class, “Optimization Models in Engineering,” which she de­scribed as “differently chal­leng­ing” to teach this se­mes­ter. The class saw a 16.8% F rate, far higher than the 5% of D’s and F’s that the EECS de­part­ment de­scribes as “typical” for an up­per di­vi­sion course.

Ranade said stu­dents are ex­pected to en­ter the course hav­ing taken classes on lin­ear al­ge­bra, vec­tor cal­cu­lus and math­e­mat­i­cal proofs. However, she found out in of­fice hours that many stu­dents strug­gled with lin­ear al­ge­bra, and was even more shocked when one stu­dent told her the lin­ear al­ge­bra class they took at UC Berkeley had an “open-internet, open-AI pol­icy” for home­work and ex­ams.

Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC fac­ulty in sign­ing a pe­ti­tion call­ing for the re­in­state­ment of ACT and SAT stan­dard­ized test­ing scores for STEM ad­mis­sions in the UC sys­tem. The pe­ti­tion and its ac­com­pa­ny­ing open let­ter de­tail sim­i­lar con­cerns with stu­dents’ math­e­mat­i­cal prepa­ra­tion.

Ranade also changed the struc­ture of the course this year. Previously, EECS 127 in­cluded a fi­nal pro­ject com­pleted with the guid­ance of the pro­fes­sor and a team of TAs. Due to a lack of staff, Ranade had to re­move this por­tion of the class, on which she said most stu­dents get high scores.

According to a post on X by EECS de­part­ment chair Jelani Nelson, the cam­pus has had to re­duce both un­der­grad­u­ate CS en­roll­ment and the num­ber of un­der­grad­u­ate TAs due to the high hourly wages that EECS TAs are paid.

Ranade and Garcia have both no­ticed the de­cline of stu­dent en­gage­ment in classes as well. Ranade said of­fice hours used to be “overflowing,” but this se­mes­ter, she and her TAs no­ticed “very low en­gage­ment” in of­fice hours, de­spite fre­quently en­cour­ag­ing stu­dents to at­tend.

Garcia found a sim­i­lar lack of at­ten­dance in his of­fice hours over the past two se­mes­ters.

“I used to have full of­fice hours, and for the first time, I was hav­ing no­body come to my of­fice hours,” Garcia said. “It was just so sur­pris­ing to sit in my of­fice alone.”

Looking for­ward, both pro­fes­sors are re­think­ing their classes.

Garcia plans to “advertise” what hap­pened in spring 2026 to his fu­ture classes on day one, while also try­ing to find a way to iden­tify stu­dents who need ex­tra re­me­dial sup­port.

Ranade em­pha­sized that pro­fes­sors should be teach­ing stu­dents “more, not less,” in the age of AI, adding that she wants stu­dents to ac­quire crit­i­cal think­ing and an­a­lyt­i­cal think­ing skills nec­es­sary to be­come lead­ers to be “in a very com­pet­i­tive world.”

Both pro­fes­sors un­der­scored the need for stu­dents to be more com­fort­able with dif­fi­cult prob­lems.

“We re­ally need to make sure that we are prepar­ing our stu­dents to be solid, con­tribut­ing cit­i­zens and lead­ers — these are Berkeley stu­dents: not just next year or the year af­ter, but for the next 40 years of their lives,” Ranade said. “We need to — and we want to — teach them how to … take on new chal­lenges.”

“I love this phrase my col­league uses: ‘Confusion is the sweat of learn­ing.’ I just love that,” Garcia said. “A lot of stu­dents, I think, are not putting in the sweat.”

A moor­ing used in the Ocean Observatories Initiative is re­cov­ered off the coast of Alaska. Rebecca Travis / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion is mov­ing to dis­man­tle an ocean ob­ser­va­tion sys­tem con­sist­ing of more than 900 in­stru­ments in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Data sup­plied by the sys­tem has been used to study key Atlantic cur­rents that in­creas­ingly ap­pear in dan­ger of col­lapse as the cli­mate warms.

Just days af­ter President Trump fired the in­de­pen­dent board over­see­ing the National Science Foundation, the NSF an­nounced the “removal of all in-wa­ter in­fra­struc­ture” be­long­ing to the Ocean Observatories Initiative at sites along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and North Carolina, and in the wa­ters be­tween Greenland and Iceland. Officials say the in­stru­ments will be re­cov­ered over the next 15 months.

The sys­tem, which be­gan op­er­at­ing in 2016, was de­signed to run for at least 25 years. After just a decade in op­er­a­tion, the loss of mon­i­tor­ing in­stru­ments will leave sci­en­tists with­out crit­i­cal data on the state of oceans and ma­rine life. That in­cludes data on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a sys­tem of ocean cur­rents that de­liv­ers warmth to north­ern Europe and shapes cli­mate glob­ally. Scientists are in­creas­ingly con­cerned the AMOC may be near­ing a “tipping point,” af­ter which it shuts down.

Without sus­tained ocean ob­ser­va­tions, “we are ef­fec­tively choos­ing to nav­i­gate an in­creas­ingly volatile ocean with di­min­ish­ing vis­i­bil­ity,” said Helen Findlay, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the U.K. Growing un­cer­tainty around the fu­ture of the AMOC, she said, “is pre­cisely why long-term, con­sis­tent mon­i­tor­ing is more vi­tal than ever.”

Democrats in Congress have said they will “fight” plans to dis­man­tle the sys­tem, The New York Times re­ports. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the more out­spo­ken mem­bers of Congress on the sub­ject of cli­mate change, said on X, “Fossil fuel is heat­ing our oceans by the zetta­joule, so Trump’s cor­rupt fos­sil fuel stooges want to turn off the mon­i­tors.”

ALSO ON YALE E360

Why Fears Are Growing Over the Fate of a Key Atlantic Current

2026 – 06-04

7 min read

VoidZero, the com­pany be­hind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+, is join­ing Cloudflare. As part of this change, all team mem­bers of VoidZero are join­ing Cloudflare, too.

Before say­ing any­thing else, we want to make the most im­por­tant thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, ven­dor-ag­nos­tic, and com­mu­nity-dri­ven. Nothing about that changes.

Cloudflare’s mis­sion is to help build a bet­ter Internet. And a bet­ter Internet is an open Internet. Developers need choice, frame­works need a neu­tral foun­da­tion, and ap­pli­ca­tions need to be portable. It is not rea­son­able to ex­pect the en­tire web ecosys­tem to build around a sin­gle ven­dor. The most im­por­tant tools and frame­works are portable by de­sign.

Vite is one of the few foun­da­tional tools that the whole JavaScript ecosys­tem agrees on. It earned that po­si­tion by be­ing fast, ex­cel­lent, portable, and ven­dor-neu­tral. One of the best ways Cloudflare can help build a bet­ter Internet is by in­vest­ing in that foun­da­tional open source tool­chain. A tool­chain that makes the Internet bet­ter for every­one, not just peo­ple who use Cloudflare or choose to host with us.

Over the last few years we’ve in­vested heav­ily in mak­ing Cloudflare the best place to build and run web­sites, ap­pli­ca­tions, and agents on our de­vel­oper plat­form. But ul­ti­mately that choice will al­ways be yours. Run your Vite ap­pli­ca­tion any­where you want.

What this means for Vite

Today’s news gives Vite more re­sources to keep grow­ing, while the things that make Vite what it is re­main the same:

Vite re­mains MIT-licensed and open source.

Vite re­mains MIT-licensed and open source.

Vite re­mains ven­dor-ag­nos­tic. Applications built with Vite run any­where and will con­tinue to do so.

Vite re­mains ven­dor-ag­nos­tic. Applications built with Vite run any­where and will con­tinue to do so.

Vite’s roadmap con­tin­ues to be dri­ven by the broader Vite team and com­mu­nity, and con­tin­ues to be de­vel­oped in the open.

Vite’s roadmap con­tin­ues to be dri­ven by the broader Vite team and com­mu­nity, and con­tin­ues to be de­vel­oped in the open.

Evan and the rest of the VoidZero team con­tinue to lead Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+.

Evan and the rest of the VoidZero team con­tinue to lead Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+.

Cloudflare is com­mit­ting en­gi­neer­ing and re­sources to those pro­jects, not redi­rect­ing them.

Cloudflare is com­mit­ting en­gi­neer­ing and re­sources to those pro­jects, not redi­rect­ing them.

We made the same kind of com­mit­ment when Astro joined Cloudflare ear­lier this year. Astro is still open source, and still de­ploys any­where. The team is still ship­ping the roadmap they were al­ready ship­ping.

This com­mit­ment mat­ters even more with Vite, be­cause Vite is not one frame­work. Vite is the foun­da­tion un­der­ly­ing so many: Vue, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Astro, Solid, Qwik, Angular, React Router, TanStack Start. Even Next.js now has a Vite-based im­ple­men­ta­tion in vinext. Vite has be­come a shared foun­da­tion for the JavaScript ecosys­tem.

Our num­ber one goal is to main­tain the trust that has earned Vite so much adop­tion. Not with our words here, but by prov­ing it every day in how we sup­port and de­velop these pro­jects.

We also want to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to our sup­port for open source and shared ecosys­tem foun­da­tions. As part of this an­nounce­ment, Cloudflare is com­mit­ting $1 mil­lion to a Vite ecosys­tem fund to sup­port main­tain­ers and con­trib­u­tors, ad­min­is­tered by the Vite core team. Vite is big­ger than VoidZero or Cloudflare, and the peo­ple who have helped build it should be part of what comes next.

Vite as the foun­da­tion

The Vite and Cloudflare teams have been col­lab­o­rat­ing well be­fore this an­nounce­ment, start­ing in 2024 with the Vite Environment API. The Environment API lets Vite run server code in some­thing other than Node.js dur­ing de­vel­op­ment. We worked closely with the Vite team on its de­sign, and then built the Cloudflare Vite plu­gin on top of it.

When you run vite dev with the Cloudflare plu­gin, your server code runs in­side work­erd, the same open-source run­time that pow­ers Workers in pro­duc­tion. Durable Objects, D1, KV, R2, Workflows, Workers AI, Agents, Service Bindings, Workers RPC — all of it runs lo­cally in­side the same run­time model as pro­duc­tion.

For a long time, the cost of de­vel­op­ing on a non-Node run­time was that lo­cal dev felt like a worse ver­sion of pro­duc­tion. The Environment API re­moved that cost with­out forc­ing any­one to adopt a Cloudflare-specific dev server. Any run­time that wants to plug into Vite can do the same thing. That kind of de­sign — a generic mech­a­nism in Vite with provider-spe­cific im­ple­men­ta­tions — has proven to work well and is one we want to keep build­ing on.

We knew we were on to some­thing when we saw adop­tion of the Cloudflare Vite plu­gin take off:

Vite’s adop­tion curve is one of the more re­mark­able things to watch in the ecosys­tem right now. As of this writ­ing, Vite is at roughly 129M weekly down­loads. The Cloudflare Vite plu­gin (@cloudflare/vite-plugin) is at al­most 14M weekly down­loads.

If you had told us a year ago that a Cloudflare Vite plu­gin would reach down­loads equiv­a­lent to more than 10% of Vite it­self, we would­n’t have be­lieved you. What hap­pened? AI hap­pened. More soft­ware is be­ing cre­ated than ever be­fore, and a lot of it starts with AI-generated code. Those ap­pli­ca­tions need a de­fault stack and a place to run. Agent-coded ap­pli­ca­tions are choos­ing Vite, and in­creas­ingly they are choos­ing Vite run­ning on Cloudflare.

AI is chang­ing how we write soft­ware

Developers used to be the only users of dev servers, bundlers, lin­ters, for­mat­ters, and CLIs. That is no longer true: agents are us­ing them too, con­stantly. They scaf­fold pro­jects, run dev servers, read er­rors, write tests, lint and for­mat code, de­ploy pre­views, and it­er­ate.

A lot of AI-generated ap­pli­ca­tions al­ready start as Vite apps, be­cause Vite is fast, well un­der­stood, and broadly com­pat­i­ble with what agents have seen in their train­ing data. Fast feed­back loops have al­ways been im­por­tant. They be­come even more crit­i­cal when writ­ing soft­ware with agents:

Fast builds, be­cause they it­er­ate more than hu­mans do.

Fast builds, be­cause they it­er­ate more than hu­mans do.

Fast tests, be­cause they re-run the suite con­stantly to ver­ify their own work.

Fast tests, be­cause they re-run the suite con­stantly to ver­ify their own work.

Fast lint­ing and for­mat­ting, be­cause those tools be­come guardrails.

Fast lint­ing and for­mat­ting, be­cause those tools be­come guardrails.

Clear, struc­tured er­rors, be­cause the agent has to read and act on them.

Clear, struc­tured er­rors, be­cause the agent has to read and act on them.

Consistent CLIs, be­cause small in­con­sis­ten­cies cause big de­tours.

Consistent CLIs, be­cause small in­con­sis­ten­cies cause big de­tours.

The en­tire VoidZero tool­chain is built for this kind of loop. Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, Oxlint, and Oxfmt are each among the fastest tools in their re­spec­tive cat­e­gories, and they work well when they are run over and over by an agent. Vite+ brings those pieces to­gether into one tool­chain, with one CLI, one con­fig­u­ra­tion model, and fewer mov­ing parts. That makes the de­vel­op­ment loop eas­ier for peo­ple to un­der­stand, and eas­ier for agents to drive re­li­ably.

We are dog­food­ing this our­selves. The Cloudflare dash­board is built on Vite. Oxlint is al­ready sav­ing days of en­gi­neer­ing time in Cloudflare code­bases. Flue, the agent har­ness frame­work from the Astro team, is also mov­ing onto Vite as its foun­da­tion. Flue can run agents on Node.js, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and more, and the Cloudflare tar­get now uses the of­fi­cial Cloudflare Vite plu­gin and work­erd in­te­gra­tion. Vite is be­com­ing the de­fault ap­pli­ca­tion foun­da­tion in­side Cloudflare too.

Vite is be­com­ing full-stack

A few years ago, the job of a build tool was straight­for­ward: take source files, pro­duce a bun­dle, hand it off. That is not enough for mod­ern ap­pli­ca­tions, es­pe­cially in a world where some of those ap­pli­ca­tions are agents them­selves.

A mod­ern ap­pli­ca­tion is server-ren­dered routes, APIs, back­ground jobs, queues, data­bases, ob­ject stor­age, real-time, auth, plus a grow­ing list of agents and AI ca­pa­bil­i­ties. The “build” is no longer the end of the story. It is the start of a de­ploy­ment that has to un­der­stand all of those pieces.

That means Vite has to be­come more than a build tool. It needs to un­der­stand more of the ap­pli­ca­tion, while stay­ing true to what made Vite work in the first place: speed, sim­plic­ity, and porta­bil­ity.

Void, a de­ploy­ment plat­form de­signed for Vite, has been an­other test­bed for these ideas. It helped ex­plore what a mod­ern ap­pli­ca­tion frame­work should own, what de­ploy­ment should feel like, and how much of the full ap­pli­ca­tion life­cy­cle can be uni­fied around one tool­chain. We have learned a lot from that work.

Now the work is putting those lessons in the right place. Some be­long in Vite it­self as provider-ag­nos­tic prim­i­tives: first-class ab­strac­tions and hooks for back­ends, APIs, agents, and de­ploy­ment that any provider can im­ple­ment. Other lessons be­long in­side Cloudflare. Cloudflare will pro­vide a first-class im­ple­men­ta­tion of those hooks on Workers and the rest of our Developer Platform.

Even though some Vite main­tain­ers are join­ing Cloudflare, changes to Vite it­self will con­tinue to go through the same open con­tri­bu­tion process as any other Vite con­tri­bu­tion. Features added to Vite it­self should not be Cloudflare-specific. They will work any­where Vite works.

Moving Cloudflare to­ward Vite

The same prin­ci­ple shaped how we think about the fu­ture of Cloudflare’s own tool­ing. We are not mov­ing Vite in the di­rec­tion of Cloudflare. We are do­ing the op­po­site: mov­ing Cloudflare’s ap­pli­ca­tion tool­ing onto Vite, so it is built on top of the same work­flows de­vel­op­ers al­ready know.

We re­cently shipped a tech­ni­cal pre­view of cf, a new uni­fied CLI for the whole Cloudflare plat­form. Vite is go­ing to be the foun­da­tion of our CLI ex­pe­ri­ence for ap­pli­ca­tions. The end goal is one con­sis­tent CLI for all of Cloudflare, with the same er­gonom­ics whether you are work­ing on Workers, R2, D1, Agents, or any­thing else.

If we do this right, the Cloudflare CLI should feel like Vite, not like a sep­a­rate thing bolted on next to Vite.

cf dev should be a su­per­set of vite dev. Same speed, same hot mod­ule re­place­ment, same plu­gin model, plus the Cloudflare run­time and bind­ings when you want them.

cf dev should be a su­per­set of vite dev. Same speed, same hot mod­ule re­place­ment, same plu­gin model, plus the Cloudflare run­time and bind­ings when you want them.

cf build should un­der­stand Vite pro­jects na­tively, with­out an adapter dance.

cf build should un­der­stand Vite pro­jects na­tively, with­out an adapter dance.

cf de­ploy should make de­ploy­ing a Vite app to Cloudflare sim­ple.

cf de­ploy should make de­ploy­ing a Vite app to Cloudflare sim­ple.

If you are run­ning Vite to­day, the path to Cloudflare will feel like swap­ping in a su­per­set of the com­mands you al­ready know. Same pro­ject shape. Same Vite work­flows. The en­tire Cloudflare de­vel­oper plat­form avail­able when you want it.

What hap­pens next

In the short term, noth­ing changes for Vite users or the frame­works build­ing on top of Vite:

Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ keep ship­ping. The VoidZero team keeps con­tribut­ing and lead­ing them.

Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ keep ship­ping. The VoidZero team keeps con­tribut­ing and lead­ing them.

The Cloudflare Vite plu­gin keeps im­prov­ing.

The Cloudflare Vite plu­gin keeps im­prov­ing.

The Environment API and the broader story of “run your server code in the right run­time lo­cally” keeps get­ting bet­ter, in­clud­ing for non-Cloud­flare run­times.

The Environment API and the broader story of “run your server code in the right run­time lo­cally” keeps get­ting bet­ter, in­clud­ing for non-Cloud­flare run­times.

Longer term:

We start the work on mov­ing the Cloudflare CLI to­ward an ex­pe­ri­ence built di­rectly on top of Vite.

We start the work on mov­ing the Cloudflare CLI to­ward an ex­pe­ri­ence built di­rectly on top of Vite.

Vite will get new, clean, provider-ag­nos­tic prim­i­tives for full-stack apps and agents that work for every­one on any plat­form.

Vite will get new, clean, provider-ag­nos­tic prim­i­tives for full-stack apps and agents that work for every­one on any plat­form.

Over time, we in­tend to open-source the Void plat­form, so oth­ers can learn from it and build their own plat­forms on top of Vite and Cloudflare.

Over time, we in­tend to open-source the Void plat­form, so oth­ers can learn from it and build their own plat­forms on top of Vite and Cloudflare.

We will do all of this in pub­lic and with the com­mu­nity. The same way Vite has al­ways been built.

Welcome VoidZero

Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ ex­ist be­cause a deep ecosys­tem of open source con­trib­u­tors put years of work into them. These pro­jects are al­ready foun­da­tional to how the web is built, and we are grate­ful to every­one who helped get them here. Thank you to every­one who has con­tributed code, re­views, is­sues, docs, plu­g­ins, in­te­gra­tions, and sup­port along the way.

We are ex­cited to wel­come the VoidZero team to Cloudflare, and ex­cited to put more re­sources be­hind these pro­jects. Our job now is to help them grow, stay open, and power the JavaScript ecosys­tem for every­one.

Vite keeps be­ing Vite. Cloudflare gets to help.

If you want to try Vite on Cloudflare to­day, run:

npm cre­ate vite@lat­est

npx wran­gler de­ploy

Franco-Iranian au­thor and film di­rec­tor Marjane Satrapi, renowned for her graphic novel and film “Persepolis”, has died aged 56, a year af­ter the pass­ing of “the love of her life”, a mem­ber of her close cir­cle said on Thursday.

“Marjane Satrapi died of sad­ness a lit­tle over a year af­ter the death of Mattias Ripa, her hus­band and the love of her life,” they said in a state­ment sent to AFP.

Born in 1969 in Rasht in north­ern Iran, Satrapi ar­rived in France in 1994 and gained French na­tion­al­ity in 2006.

An out­spo­ken critic of Iran’s theo­cratic gov­ern­ment, Satrapi’s “Persepolis” re­counts her early life in Tehran, strug­gling with re­stric­tions im­posed by Iran’s Islamic lead­er­ship af­ter the 1979 rev­o­lu­tion be­fore her par­ents sent her to Europe and she be­gan a life in ex­ile.

French President Emmanuel Macron paid trib­ute to Satrapi, say­ing she was “a great artist who turned her Iranian child­hood into a uni­ver­sal tale”.

The films she di­rected in­cluded a 2007 adap­ta­tion of the graphic novel of “Persepolis” – co-di­rected by Vincent Paronnaud – which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nom­i­nated for an Oscar.

“Even if this is a uni­ver­sal film, I want to ded­i­cate this prize to all Iranians,” Satrapi said at the time.

“Marjane was an ex­tra­or­di­nary artist and a charm­ing woman who em­bod­ied the joy of cre­ation and the sor­row of ex­ile and painful mem­o­ries. We mourn her this morn­ing,” Cannes fes­ti­val supremo Thierry Fremaux told AFP.

‘Her courage will res­onate’

She was a vo­cal sup­porter of the protests that erupted in the Islamic re­pub­lic af­ter the 2022 death of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in cus­tody for al­legedly breach­ing the dress code for women.

She cu­rated a col­lec­tion of graphic sto­ries on the “Women, Life, Freedom” move­ment in her lat­est book that came out in English in 2024, and was among those at a protest in Paris that same year to mark two years since Amini’s death.

“It’s very im­por­tant that this regime dis­ap­pears,” she said of the Islamic re­pub­lic, but she stressed it could not hap­pen overnight.

“I think it’s im­por­tant to re­main hope­ful.”

The foun­da­tion of Narges Mohammadi, the jailed Iranian Nobel peace prize win­ner, praised Satrapi as “a fear­less voice for fem­i­nism, hu­man rights, and free­dom”.

“She con­sis­tently ad­vo­cated for wom­en’s rights, stand­ing in sol­i­dar­ity with the peo­ple of Iran and am­pli­fy­ing the mes­sage of the Woman, Life, Freedom move­ment on the global stage,” it said.

“Her courage will con­tinue to res­onate far be­yond her life­time.”

Also a painter, in 2020 Satrapi ex­hib­ited a se­ries of works she said she had spent the past seven years paint­ing be­tween other pro­jects, speak­ing of a need to iso­late her­self from the world with her can­vases.

“I think my men­tal health de­pends on it,” she said.

She said she be­lieved in be­ing a fem­i­nist through her ac­tions.

“If I show that I know how to do things just as well as – or even bet­ter than – a man, then I’ve won the bat­tle and I can be an ex­am­ple for the girl who will come af­ter me,” she said.

‘Love of my life’

She said last year she had turned down France’s high­est civil­ian ho­n­our, the le­gion d’hon­neur, ac­cus­ing the coun­try of “hypocrisy” over visa poli­cies that pre­vented dis­si­dents trav­el­ling from Iran to France.

Read more’Perse­polis’ au­thor re­fuses French award over Iran ‘hypocrisy’

“I can’t ig­nore what I see as a hyp­o­crit­i­cal at­ti­tude to­wards Iran, which forged the other part of my iden­tity,” she wrote, adding that she meant no dis­re­spect to the award and that she loved France “deeply”.

Her work ex­panded be­yond sto­ries con­nected to Iran, in­clud­ing “Radioactive”, a 2019 biopic about pi­o­neer­ing ra­dioac­tiv­ity re­searcher and Nobel-prize win­ner Marie Curie, star­ring Rosamund Pike.

Her hus­band, a Swedish pro­ducer, ac­tor and screen­writer, had been a long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor.

After his death on April 8 last year, Satrapi founded the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation to sup­port for­eign stu­dents wish­ing to come to Paris to study film­mak­ing.

Since he died, Satrapi’s Instagram page con­sisted al­most ex­clu­sively of a se­ries of im­ages spelling out “For I lost the love of my life”, along with a pic­ture of her hus­band and an an­nounce­ment of the foun­da­tion.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Wind and so­lar just hit a ma­jor global mile­stone: For the first time ever, they gen­er­ated more elec­tric­ity than gas for the full month of April.

According to new analy­sis from in­de­pen­dent en­ergy think tank Ember, wind and so­lar pro­duced 22% of the world’s elec­tric­ity in April 2026, com­pared to 20% from gas. Together, the two re­new­able sources gen­er­ated a record 531 ter­awatt-hours (TWh) of elec­tric­ity dur­ing the month, 54 TWh more than gas plants gen­er­ated glob­ally, at 477 TWh.

The tim­ing is no­table. April marked the first full month of the lat­est global en­ergy cri­sis tied to the con­flict in the Middle East, and the data shows how quickly re­new­ables are chang­ing the power mix even as fos­sil fuel mar­kets re­main volatile.

Five years ago, in April 2021, gas gen­er­a­tion was al­most iden­ti­cal to to­day’s level at 476 TWh. But back then, wind and so­lar com­bined gen­er­ated just 245 TWh — less than half of what they pro­duced this April.

Wind and so­lar con­tinue to grow

Ember says the lat­est num­bers weren’t dri­ven by the cur­rent cri­sis it­self but by years of rapid re­new­able en­ergy growth. Wind and so­lar grew fast enough in April to meet most of the in­crease in global elec­tric­ity de­mand, which helped limit growth in gas gen­er­a­tion.

The data also showed no signs of wide­spread switch­ing from gas back to coal de­spite con­cerns over en­ergy se­cu­rity and fuel prices.

Wind and so­lar gen­er­a­tion in­creased across nearly every ma­jor mar­ket re­port­ing April data. Globally, out­put rose an es­ti­mated 13% year over year, in­clud­ing:

China: +14%

EU: +13%

UK: +35%

US: +8%

Australia: +17%

Chile: +24%

Brazil: +4%

April tends to be the strongest month for this kind of mile­stone be­cause spring weather in the Northern Hemisphere usu­ally brings a com­bi­na­tion of strong wind gen­er­a­tion, ris­ing so­lar out­put, and lower elec­tric­ity de­mand be­tween heat­ing and cool­ing sea­sons.

Still, the broader trend is clear. Ember’s re­cent Global Electricity Review found that wind and so­lar met all global elec­tric­ity de­mand growth in 2025.

Countries are ac­cel­er­at­ing re­new­able en­ergy plans

Governments around the world are also ramp­ing up re­new­able en­ergy tar­gets to re­duce de­pen­dence on volatile fos­sil fuel im­ports.

Recent an­nounce­ments tracked by the Global Renewables Alliance in­clude Indonesia’s plan to de­velop 100 GW of so­lar + stor­age ca­pac­ity, South Korea’s tar­get to triple its re­new­ables ca­pac­ity to 100 GW by 2030, and faster re­new­able en­ergy de­ploy­ment in coun­tries in­clud­ing the Philippines, Thailand, and the UK.

“Countries around the world have been turn­ing to wind and so­lar be­cause they are cheap, home­grown, and se­cure sources of elec­tric­ity,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global elec­tric­ity an­a­lyst at Ember.

“The cur­rent en­ergy cri­sis has fur­ther strength­ened the eco­nomic case for re­new­ables com­pared to im­ported gas, while also adding greater po­lit­i­cal ur­gency to ac­cel­er­ate de­ploy­ment. For many im­port­ing coun­tries, LNG-powered elec­tric­ity is in­creas­ingly un­able to com­pete with wind and so­lar.”

Read more: This US city is putting so­lar + bat­ter­ies on 150 homes to cut bills

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Executive sum­mary

This re­port re­veals how re­tired se­nior British mil­i­tary fig­ures are fre­quently pre­sented in the UK me­dia as purely in­de­pen­dent ex­perts on de­fence and se­cu­rity mat­ters with­out men­tion of their per­sonal com­mer­cial and em­ploy­ment in­ter­ests in the de­fence, tech­nol­ogy, in­tel­li­gence, and se­cu­rity sec­tors in those re­ports. By analysing me­dia re­ports be­tween 2015 and May 2026, AOAV iden­ti­fied a re­peated pat­tern where al­most 60% of for­mer key mil­i­tary per­son­nel with links to the de­fence in­dus­try were found to have been — at least once — cited in the British me­dia pri­mar­ily by a ref­er­ence to their rank and pre­vi­ous ser­vice, with­out au­di­ences be­ing in­formed of their cur­rent post-ser­vice de­fence ad­vi­sory roles, con­sul­tan­cies, di­rec­tor­ships, or fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests. So, while post-ser­vice com­mer­cial work is com­mon, we doc­u­mented a sys­temic fail­ure of the UK me­dia to dis­close such em­ploy­ment and to high­light po­ten­tial con­flicts of in­ter­est.

Our re­port ar­gues that re­port­ing of such vested in­ter­ests, im­proved ed­i­to­r­ial due dili­gence, and a broader range of voices are nec­es­sary to en­sure au­di­ences are able to prop­erly as­sess ex­pert com­men­tary on is­sues of de­fence and the arms trade with in­formed scep­ti­cism.

Key find­ings

The re­search iden­ti­fied 33 re­tired se­nior mil­i­tary of­fi­cers who left the British armed forces be­tween 2015 and May 2026 and who sub­se­quently held cur­rent or for­mer com­mer­cial po­si­tions in the de­fence, se­cu­rity, in­tel­li­gence, tech­nol­ogy, or re­lated sec­tors. These in­di­vid­u­als had also been quoted, fea­tured, or oth­er­wise used as com­men­ta­tors in UK me­dia cov­er­age of de­fence, con­flict, or na­tional se­cu­rity is­sues.

Of these, we found that 19 or 58% of these had been given a me­dia plat­form to de­bate de­fence mat­ters — at least on one oc­ca­sion — with­out the me­dia out­lets in­volved iden­ti­fied not­ing their com­mer­cial or fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests in the de­fence in­dus­try.

Instead, com­men­ta­tors were iden­ti­fied solely by their for­mer mil­i­tary rank or pre­vi­ous com­mand po­si­tions. This, we con­tend, cre­ates the im­pres­sion of im­par­tial and in­de­pen­dent ex­per­tise.

The un­re­ported in­ter­ests in­cluded ad­vi­sory roles, con­sul­tancy work, board mem­ber­ships, ex­ec­u­tive po­si­tions, strate­gic part­ner­ships, and ma­jor share­hold­ings con­nected to de­fence con­trac­tors, mil­i­tary tech­nol­ogy firms, cy­ber­se­cu­rity com­pa­nies, and geopo­lit­i­cal con­sul­tan­cies.

Several com­men­ta­tors pub­licly ad­vo­cated in­creased British de­fence spend­ing or ex­panded mil­i­tary en­gage­ment, de­spite si­mul­ta­ne­ously hold­ing po­si­tions linked to in­dus­tries that could ben­e­fit from such rec­om­men­da­tions.

This re­search does not sug­gest that any in­di­vid­ual cited in this re­port de­lib­er­ately con­cealed their com­mer­cial af­fil­i­a­tions from jour­nal­ists. Rather, it high­lights a re­cur­ring fail­ure by news or­gan­i­sa­tions to dis­close po­ten­tially rel­e­vant in­dus­try in­ter­ests when pre­sent­ing for­mer se­nior mil­i­tary fig­ures as in­de­pen­dent ex­pert com­men­ta­tors on de­fence, con­flict, and na­tional se­cu­rity is­sues.

The role of mil­i­tary vet­er­ans in the UK’s me­dia de­bate on de­fence spendine

In the UK, the pub­lic’s un­der­stand­ing of mat­ters of war, na­tional se­cu­rity, and de­fence pol­icy is al­most en­tirely shaped by me­dia com­men­tary from fig­ures pre­sented as au­thor­i­ta­tive mil­i­tary ex­perts.

The go-to for most re­porters is re­tired se­nior of­fi­cers and for­mer com­man­ders, who are rou­tinely quoted in print, broad­cast, and dig­i­tal me­dia to ex­plain un­fold­ing con­flicts, de­fence bud­gets, mil­i­tary power and, of course, to of­fer their opin­ion. Such views carry sub­stan­tial weight, largely be­cause of their pro­fes­sional rep­u­ta­tion, long ser­vice, and the per­ceived im­par­tial­ity of mil­i­tary ex­per­tise which — es­pe­cially in the UK — is largely seen to be apo­lit­i­cal. This is the as­sumed po­si­tion of most pub­lic ser­vants and such as­sump­tion of im­par­tial­ity im­plic­itly reaches across into their post-ser­vice opin­ion.

However, this re­port finds that a grow­ing num­ber of mil­i­tary com­men­ta­tors are pre­sented to the pub­lic solely by their for­mer mil­i­tary rank, de­spite their hold­ing pri­vate sec­tor roles, di­rec­tor­ships, ad­vi­sory po­si­tions, or share­hold­ings linked di­rectly to the arms trade, se­cu­rity and de­fence tech­nol­ogy.

Of course, hold­ing pri­vate-sec­tor roles af­ter mil­i­tary ser­vice is both law­ful and com­mon­place. This is not the point of this re­port. Rather, the con­cern high­lighted here is about the UK’s me­dia. It is one of trans­parency, the fail­ure to re­port on po­ten­tial con­flicts of in­ter­est, and pub­lic ac­count­abil­ity. When au­di­ences are de­nied in­for­ma­tion that is es­sen­tial to analyse a cer­tain is­sue, par­tic­u­larly when such in­for­ma­tion re­veals that those in­di­vid­u­als com­men­tat­ing may stand to ben­e­fit fi­nan­cially or pro­fes­sion­ally, it be­comes a real prob­lem.

This re­port doc­u­ments 19 se­nior mil­i­tary fig­ures of 33 iden­ti­fied and analysed who were quoted, fea­tured, or com­mented in ma­jor me­dia out­lets ex­clu­sively in their ca­pac­ity as for­mer mil­i­tary lead­ers, de­spite hold­ing rel­e­vant po­si­tions that pre­sent clear yet undis­closed con­flicts of in­ter­est.

The find­ings pre­sented here do not ar­gue that the in­di­vid­u­als iden­ti­fied are act­ing im­prop­erly, nor that their analy­ses lack merit, how­ever we as­sert that the pub­lic has a right to full and rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion when eval­u­at­ing ex­pert com­men­tary, par­tic­u­larly where it in­volves lives, pub­lic ex­pen­di­ture, and in­ter­na­tional se­cu­rity. This re­port con­tends that such an omis­sion cre­ates a mis­lead­ing im­pres­sion of in­de­pen­dence and ob­jec­tiv­ity, and frankly, does not give the pub­lic the full pic­ture of po­ten­tial bias and even the con­cern about prof­i­teer­ing.

Methodology

This study of key mil­i­tary fig­ures, their back­ground, cur­rent and past ap­point­ments, and sub­se­quent re­port­ing in the me­dia was all ex­e­cuted through the use of open-source data. AOAV ini­tially drew up a list of top mil­i­tary fig­ures in­clud­ing re­cently re­tired Major Generals of the British Army, Air Marshals of the Royal Air Force, and Admirals and First Sea Lords of the Royal Navy. The next stage of the re­search was to de­ter­mine each fig­ure’s roles fol­low­ing de­par­ture from the mil­i­tary, in­clud­ing non-ex­ec­u­tive po­si­tions and share­hold­ings. We omit­ted from our find­ings se­nior vet­er­ans who had not gone into the mil­i­tary-in­dus­trial work­force. The re­search, which was fo­cused on the pe­riod 2015 to the pre­sent (May 2026) ac­cord­ingly iden­ti­fied some 33 key mil­i­tary fig­ures ei­ther cur­rently have or had com­mer­cial/​pri­vate di­rec­tor­ships, share­hold­ings, or other roles/​vested in­ter­ests within the de­fence sec­tor and sur­round­ing in­dus­tries who were quoted or of­fered com­men­tary in the me­dia. Well over half — 19 — were done with­out any ref­er­ence to their pri­vate, mil­i­tary-in­dus­trial ap­point­ments.

For each in­di­vid­ual iden­ti­fied in the dataset, open-source records were ac­cessed to es­tab­lish cur­rent and past af­fil­i­a­tions be­yond mil­i­tary ser­vice. The fol­low­ing sources were used to col­lect and cross-ver­ify pro­fes­sional in­for­ma­tion:

LinkedIn — where avail­able, to iden­tify self-re­ported em­ploy­ment his­tory, board mem­ber­ships, ad­vi­sory roles, and any other rel­e­vant ap­point­ments.

Company web­sites — to con­firm di­rec­tor­ships, ex­ec­u­tive roles, ad­vi­sory po­si­tions, and busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties.

Companies House (UK) — to ver­ify cur­rent and past di­rec­tor­ships and share­hold­ing fil­ings.

Parliamentary Registers of Interests — to iden­tify de­clared fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests, con­sul­tancy roles, or paid po­si­tions rel­e­vant to de­fence and se­cu­rity where such reg­is­ters are pub­licly avail­able.

To es­tab­lish whether vested in­ter­ests were trans­par­ently com­mu­ni­cated or dis­closed in the me­dia, each iden­ti­fied in­di­vid­u­al’s me­dia ap­pear­ances were then re­viewed via Google News search. Primary me­dia sources pri­mar­ily in­cluded on­line news plat­forms and dig­i­tal news­pa­pers. For each ap­pear­ance, the fol­low­ing was analysed: the form of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion used by the me­dia (e.g. mil­i­tary rank only), whether any cur­rent roles or vested in­ter­ests were men­tioned, and the con­text and sub­ject mat­ter of the com­men­tary.

Why this re­port is nec­es­sary: the need for greater trans­parency in re­port­ing on vet­er­ans’ voices in the British me­dia

Public com­men­tary on de­fence, na­tional se­cu­rity, and mil­i­tary con­flict fre­quently re­lies on the views of se­nior for­mer mil­i­tary of­fi­cers. Individuals iden­ti­fied as ma­jor gen­er­als, air mar­shals, ad­mi­rals, or for­mer ser­vice chiefs are pre­sented to the pub­lic as au­thor­i­ta­tive, ex­pert voices and their as­sess­ments con­sid­ered cred­i­ble and trans­par­ent by au­di­ences. When me­dia cov­er­age reg­u­larly re­lies on de­fence-aligned com­men­ta­tors with­out proper con­text, it lim­its the range of views the pub­lic hears. Over time, this can shape how threats are un­der­stood, which pol­icy choices seem rea­son­able, and which re­sponses ap­pear nec­es­sary. In ar­eas such as war, mil­i­tary spend­ing, and in­ter­na­tional se­cu­rity, this can have con­se­quences for pub­lic de­bate and de­mo­c­ra­tic de­ci­sion-mak­ing.

It is im­por­tant to note that this re­port does not al­lege wrong­do­ing on the part of the in­di­vid­u­als iden­ti­fied, nor on the part of the pub­li­ca­tions pre­sented within the pages of this re­port. However, the con­cern is that with­out ad­e­quate dis­clo­sure, au­di­ences are un­able to prop­erly as­sess pos­si­ble in­flu­ences on ex­pert com­men­tary, which ul­ti­mately weak­ens trust.

Dr Paul Lashmar, for­mer Head of the Department of Journalism at City, University of London said of the find­ings: “It is not good enough for the jour­nal­ist just to give the for­mer rank and name of mil­i­tary com­men­ta­tor if the are now work­ing for de­fence con­trac­tor. Current em­ploy­ment if rel­e­vant must be stated oth­er­wise the pub­lic can obliv­i­ous of any con­flict of in­ter­est. For ex­am­ple, it is one thing to have led a tank reg­i­ment but an­other if the ‘expert’ is now work­ing for a com­pany man­u­fac­tur­ing tanks.”

Professor Justin Schlosberg, an ex­pert on hid­den me­dia power, own­er­ship and dis­in­for­ma­tion, said “that nearly 60% of these se­nior mil­i­tary com­men­ta­tors were pre­sented with­out dis­clos­ing their cor­po­rate pay­mas­ters un­der­mines the prin­ci­ples of trans­par­ent, pub­lic in­ter­est jour­nal­ism. It’s a re­flec­tion of how cap­tured British jour­nal­ism is by the mil­i­tary in­dus­trial com­plex. An open and hon­est de­bate about un­prece­dented mil­i­tari­sa­tion has never been more needed. Instead it’s been turned into a man­aged con­sen­sus.”

Dr Richard Danbury, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City, University of London, also told AOAV, “If you’re quoted as an ex­pert by a jour­nal­ist, the pub­lic ought to know if what you’re say­ing might be in­flu­enced by your day job. That’s so an au­di­ence can weigh your words ap­pro­pri­ately. The same hap­pens in other ar­eas, such as sci­ence and med­i­cine, and Parliamentarians have to de­clare in­ter­ests they have in what they’re giv­ing speeches about. It makes sense that de­clar­ing your in­ter­ests ought to hap­pen in jour­nal­ism too.”

In this spirit, AOAV’s re­port set out to gauge the ex­tent of non-dis­clo­sure, show­ing it is a pat­tern rather than iso­lated cases, and in so do­ing urges me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions to sup­port stronger stan­dards of trans­parency and ac­count­abil­ity in de­fence and se­cu­rity re­port­ing.

Senior mil­i­tary vet­er­ans and how the me­dia re­ports on their po­ten­tial con­flicts of in­ter­est

This sec­tion pro­files 19 ex­am­ples of re­tired se­nior mil­i­tary fig­ures who have been cited in the me­dia with­out full dis­clo­sure and trans­parency of their pro­fes­sional and fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests. In each case, the analy­sis high­lights rel­e­vant com­mer­cial roles, di­rec­tor­ships, share­hold­ings, or other af­fil­i­a­tions that were not dis­closed to au­di­ences, and that may give rise to po­ten­tial con­flicts of in­ter­est. There is ab­solutely no claim that any­one on this list has not dis­closed their cur­rent con­flicts-of-in­ter­est. We as­sume the re­spon­si­bil­ity to re­port on this lies with the jour­nal­ists in­volved in the re­ports, not their in­ter­vie­wees.

1. Nick Carter

General Sir Nicholas Patrick Carter is a re­tired Senior British Army Officer who served as Chief of the Defence Staff from June 2018 to December 2021. Sir Nick is a Strategic Advisor for Aerospace and Defence at Exigent Capital, an Israeli-based fi­nan­cial ser­vices firm with a UK reach. His role in­volves pro­vid­ing strate­gic con­sult­ing to Israeli de­fence com­pa­nies and help­ing them de­velop in­ter­na­tional growth strate­gies. According to Declassified UK, “Carter no­ti­fied ACOBA of 12 jobs he had been of­fered since step­ping down from the army in July 2022, al­though Exigent was not among them. General Carter and Exigent did not re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment on when they be­gan work­ing to­gether. A LinkedIn post by the com­pany shows they had started at least three months ago, when Exigent said: “We look for­ward to shar­ing his un­par­al­leled ex­per­tise, in­sights and net­work with our clients.” His other job of­fers en­com­passed un­paid roles at Harvard and Stanford uni­ver­si­ties, plus a trustee­ship at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. Paid po­si­tions in­cluded work­ing part-time as a strate­gic ad­vi­sor for Schroders bank, plus ad­vi­sory roles at Helsing — a German AI de­fence start-up — and an in­sur­ance firm. On top of this, Sir Nick spends 30 days per year “as a thought part­ner for Tony Blair in his role as Executive Chairman” at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. And he is chair­man of Equilibrium Gulf Limited, which ad­vises the crown prince of Bahrain on the au­to­cratic coun­try’s no­to­ri­ously bru­tal in­te­rior min­istry.” Sir Nick has been quoted across var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions re-in­creas­ing de­fence spend­ing, with only ref­er­ence to his mil­i­tary sta­tus. For ex­am­ple, he is quoted in The Telegraph on 21 February 2025 as, “Gen Sir Nick, who was the chief of the de­fence staff be­tween 2018 and 2021, said he thought that the UK and its European al­lies needed to “state a po­si­tion” and that de­fence spend­ing had to in­crease now.” He is quoted sim­i­larly in both The Independent and The Daily Mail. In a self-au­thored ar­ti­cle for Politico, Sir Nick dis­closes him­self only as ‘the for­mer U.K. Chief of the Defence Staff and strate­gic coun­selor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.’ In an Express ar­ti­cle dated 11 February 2026, Sir Nick is also quoted as ‘former UK Chief of Defence Staff’ in a piece de­tail­ing Europe’s decades of de­fence un­der­in­vest­ment as be­ing no longer in­ef­fi­cient but dan­ger­ous.

2. Chris Deverell

General Sir Christopher Michael Deverell, KCB, MBE, is a re­tired British Army Officer who served as Commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command and mem­ber of the UK Chiefs of Staff Committee from April 2016 to May 2019. Sir Christopher founded Deverell Innovation Ventures, an Innovation, Strategy and Leadership Consultancy. Between 2023 and 2024 its eq­uity rose by 202% to 395,979. Partners listed in­clude New Orbit, Babcock, Helsing, and Distance Technologies. In an Independent ar­ti­cle on 8 March 2022, Sir Christopher was quoted as a “retired army gen­eral”, ad­vo­cat­ing for a no fly zone over Ukraine. In a self-au­thored ar­ti­cle in The Telegraph from 5 November 2025, Sir Christopher ad­vo­cated for in­creased de­fence spend­ing. He is re­ferred to at the end of the ar­ti­cle as “General (Retd) Sir Chris Deverell was the four-star head of Joint Forces Command and a se­nior of­fi­cer in the British Army. His ca­reer in­cluded com­mand of 4th Armoured Brigade in Germany”. No ref­er­ence was made to his con­sul­tancy work with de­fence tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies.

3. James Everard

General Sir James Rupert Everard, KCB, CBE, is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer who served as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. His LinkedIn pro­file shows him cur­rently as Advisor to the CEO at IDU — a soft­ware com­pany work­ing in en­hanc­ing on­board­ing ex­pe­ri­ences — from 2019, President at ABF The Soldier’s Charity from April 2020, Lead Senior Mentor at NATO from March 2017, and Advisor at WithYouWithMe — a global tech com­pany — from 2022. No men­tion is made of his mem­ber­ship at Alphen Group, who are fo­cused on pro­vid­ing ac­tion­able, high-level so­lu­tions for European se­cu­rity and de­fence. Sir James is quoted in a Telegraph ar­ti­cle from 24 December 2024 ti­tled “Army must aban­don ‘self-harming’ spend­ing cuts, says Former com­man­der”. He is specif­i­cally quoted as say­ing, “I think it’s no se­cret that years of un­der-in­vest­ment have left us in a place where the gap be­tween where you are and where you need to be is so big that it’s a moun­tain to climb for any gov­ern­ment of any kind.” Whilst men­tion is made of his roles within NATO and Army Benevolent Fund, there is no men­tion of his strate­gic con­sul­tancy roles or mem­ber­ships. A sim­i­lar lack of de­tail can be told in an ipa­per ar­ti­cle dated 27 December 2024 where Sir James again ad­vo­cated for in­creased de­fence spend­ing, and we, as the reader, are only made aware of his pre­vi­ous mil­i­tary ca­reer and his role as ‘NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe’.

4. Nick Houghton

Field Marshal John Nicholas Reynolds Houghton, Baron Houghton of Richmond, GCB, CBE, DL, is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer and for­mer Chief of the Defence Staff of the British Armed Forces. According to the House of Lord’s Register of Interests Baron Houghton is Senior Defence and Security Adviser at Thales UK, a de­fence and cy­ber­se­cu­rity so­lu­tions group; Strategic Adviser at Whitespace, an AI as­sisted de­ci­sion-mak­ing com­pany; Senior Military Adviser at SecureCloud+, a tech com­pany fo­cus­ing on data ex­ploita­tion and se­cure com­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices; and Non-executive Director at Draken Topco LLC, which pro­vides tech­nol­ogy-led train­ing for mil­i­tary per­son­nel fo­cus­ing on “degraded bat­tle­space.” He is also now non-ex­ec­u­tive Chairman of Defence Holdings PLC, a UK based soft­ware-led de­fence com­pany. As of August 2025, Whitespace and Defence Holdings have formed a new strate­gic part­ner­ship.  In an ar­ti­cle in the Daily Mail dated 2 April 2024, Baron Houghton backed the Mail’s cam­paign to in­crease de­fence spend­ing. There was no men­tion made of his var­i­ous vested in­ter­ests.

5. Carleton-Smith

General Sir Mark Alexander Popham Carleton-Smith, GCB, CBE, DL, is a for­mer Senior British Army Officer who served as Chief of the General Staff from June 2018 to 2022. He has also held mul­ti­ple other mil­i­tary po­si­tions dur­ing his ca­reer from 2002. He has been a Senior Consultant at CT Group (a global, po­lit­i­cal and strate­gic con­sul­tancy) from December 2023 to pre­sent, and Non Executive Director at SafeLane Global (who spe­cialise in coun­ter­ing ex­plo­sive & haz­ardous ma­te­r­ial threats and se­cu­rity risks), also from December 2023 to pre­sent. In December 2023, the Guardian re­ported that Carleton-Smith had joined Lynton Crosby’s CT Group to ad­vise clients on de­fence in­dus­try op­por­tu­ni­ties linked to the Aukus pact. Carleton-Smith is quoted in an ar­ti­cle in The Sun on 13 October 2024, re­ferred to as the SAS’ “Colonel Commandant” and “former Army chief and SAS boss,” with­out ref­er­ence to his com­mer­cial roles. More re­cently in March 2026, he is re­ferred to as “General Sir Mark Carleton Smith” in a Forces News video re the need to ‘future proof’ the bases in Cyprus by way of ‘a de­gree of in­fra­struc­ture up­grade.’

6. Rupert Jones

Major General Rupert Timothy Herbert Jones CBE is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer, who served as the Standing Joint Force Commander from November 2018 to July 2021. According to LinkedIn, he is a “Strategic, Leadership and Boardroom ad­vi­sor draw­ing on 30 years’ ex­pe­ri­ence lead­ing mil­i­tary and in­ter-agency teams at home and in in­ter­na­tional crises from Sarajevo to Raqqah.” Major General Jones has held mul­ti­ple se­nior ad­vi­sory and con­sult­ing roles, in­clud­ing Partner and Head of Strategy Execution at Strategia Worldwide, a com­pany fo­cused on help­ing ex­e­cute strat­egy, man­age and as­sess risk for busi­ness; and Consultant at Berwicks Consultants, which helps or­gan­i­sa­tions with risk and cri­sis re­sponse. He also serves as a Consultant at Skyral, an AI de­fence com­pany; a Principal at Pallas Advisors, an or­gan­i­sa­tion that helps tech com­pa­nies nav­i­gate com­plex na­tional se­cu­rity dy­nam­ics; and an Advisor at Optimi Health, a vir­tual sports med­i­cine clinic. In December 2023, Major General Jone ad­di­tion­ally took on the role of Senior Adviser at IBM, con­tin­u­ing a port­fo­lio ca­reer fo­cused on strat­egy, ad­vi­sory, and ex­e­cu­tion lead­er­ship. Also ac­cord­ing to his LinkedIn, he is a Principal at Pallas Advisors — a com­pany that spe­cialises in na­tional se­cu­rity, in­no­va­tion, and de­fence — since December 2021. Pallas is an American com­pany. Major General Jones is widely quoted in the me­dia, mak­ing reg­u­lar ap­pear­ances on Sky News. In the Express, he com­mented on the Ukraine war, and in an Opinion piece with Defence Connect, Major General Jone analysed the de­gree to which tech­nol­ogy has changed the way that we fight across bat­tle­fields from Ukraine to Mosul. Major General Jones ap­peared on PBS New Hour on 13 September 2024 as ‘Major General’ and ‘Military Analyst’, say­ing the equip­ment the British mil­i­tary has is “not fit for pur­pose”. Across all medi­ums, there was no dis­clo­sure of Major General Jones’ var­i­ous con­flict­ing ap­point­ments.

7. Richard Kemp

Colonel Richard Justin Kemp CBE is a re­tired British Army of­fi­cer who served from 1977 to 2006. He is an ad­vi­sor at Cardinal Point Strategies — a con­sult­ing firm that spe­cialises in in­tel­li­gence, law en­force­ment, home­land se­cu­rity, and pub­lic safety mat­ters — where it is noted “he is a reg­u­lar colum­nist for ‘The Times’ of London, fre­quently writes for other na­tional and in­ter­na­tional news­pa­pers and is a pro­lific con­trib­u­tor to tele­vi­sion and ra­dio news and cur­rent af­fairs pro­grammes. His TV ap­pear­ances in­clude ma­jor con­tri­bu­tions to a sem­i­nal Channel 4 doc­u­men­tary on po­lit­i­cal kid­nap­ping and the BBC’s re­cent ‘Secret Pakistan’ se­ries. He was chief ad­viser for the ac­claimed new TV drama, ‘Secret State’ and Co-Producer of the Lionsgate ac­tion movie ‘I Am Soldier’, re­leased in 2014.”  Kemp is also the di­rec­tor of the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers, UK-AWIS — an Israeli or­gan­i­sa­tion man­aged by the Israel Defense Forces. The or­gan­i­sa­tion was is­sued an of­fi­cial warn­ing from the Charity Commission in July 2025 over post­ing a video con­tain­ing a dis­tress­ing scene. On nu­mer­ous oc­ca­sions Colonel Kemp’s other in­ter­ests are not men­tioned in re­la­tion to his jour­nal­is­tic work. Colonel Kemp au­thored an ar­ti­cle in the Telegraph dated 8 August 2025 ti­tled “Israel has lit­tle choice to oc­cupy Gaza” with no dis­clo­sure of his ties to the IDF. This fol­lowed the BBC’s fail­ure to dis­close Kemp’s links to the IDF dur­ing a ra­dio show on 13 June 2025, de­spite the fail­ure to re­port his links to the IDF be­ing up­held in a pre­vi­ous com­plaint to the BBC — this time on Newsnight. Colonel Kemp also au­thored an­other Telegraph ar­ti­cle dated 29 September 2025 ti­tled ‘Trump’s Gaza deal is the best chance to end this war’, with no men­tion of his own con­flict­ing links. More re­cently, Kemp is quoted as Colonel and for­mer British Army Commander in an Express ar­ti­cle dated 8 March 2026 in an opin­ion piece re Labour’s stance on the Iran war, again with no con­tex­tu­al­i­sa­tion of his other roles.

8. Stuart Peach

Air Chief Marshal Stuart William Peach is a British re­tired se­nior Royal Air Force of­fi­cer. On 21 November 2022, he was cre­ated Baron Peach of Grantham in the County of Lincolnshire. He sits as a cross­bencher. His par­lia­men­tary reg­is­tered in­ter­ests in­clude a range of se­nior ad­vi­sory, men­tor­ing, and lead­er­ship roles across de­fence, se­cu­rity, in­tel­li­gence, and space-re­lated in­dus­tries. He is a Director of Stuart Peach Consultancy Limited, his per­sonal ser­vice com­pany, and pre­vi­ously served as the UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the Western Balkans un­til March 2025. He acts as a men­tor to the UK Ministry of Defence and is Chair of Super-Sharp Space Systems Limited, which fo­cuses on space-based Earth ob­ser­va­tion, as well as men­tor of Chair Mentors International. In ad­di­tion, he serves as Global Adviser to Maxar Intelligence UK, which pro­vides geospa­tial in­for­ma­tion and in­tel­li­gence; Strategic Adviser to Oliver Wyman plc on de­fence re­form; Adviser to SR-M, a global in­tel­li­gence and cy­ber se­cu­rity or­gan­i­sa­tion; and Chair of Second Air Support Ltd, a com­pany spe­cial­is­ing in the re­pair and main­te­nance of air­craft and space­craft. In a This is Money ar­ti­cle from 16 March 2025 about the sign­ing of a joint let­ter sup­port­ing the launch of a £100bn Defence Security & Resilience bank for rear­ma­ment in the UK and the Continent, Air Chief Marshal Peach is only quoted as”’Lord [Stuart] Peach, Air Chief Marshal, for­mer Chief of Defence Staff and chair­man of NATO’s Military Committee”.

9. David Richards

Field Marshal David Julian Richards, Baron Richards of Herstmonceux, GCB, CBE, DSO, DL  is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer and Peer who was for­merly the Chief of the Defence Staff, the pro­fes­sional head of the British Armed Forces. Baron Richards has been re­ported to have worked as a con­sul­tant for the gov­ern­ment of the United Arab Emirates and has ad­vised American arms com­pany DynCorp. This is con­firmed in a Times Article which refers to doc­u­ments that set out the com­mis­sions ac­cepted by his com­pany, which in­clude “DynCorp International, a US-based pri­vate mil­i­tary con­trac­tor and CQS, an as­set man­age­ment com­pany.” From October 2013, Baron Richards has worked as a Senior Adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Baron Richards is widely quoted in the me­dia in re­la­tion to his ‘Field Marshal’ ti­tle. For ex­am­ple, he is quoted in The Independent on 19 October 2025; “Field Marshal Lord Richards said Kyiv will not be able to drive Vladimir Putin’s sol­diers out of Ukraine with­out the help of NATO forces — who won’t get in­volved on the ground.” There are fur­ther ex­am­ples in The Independent again, along­side an ar­ti­cle in The Times and SFG Media, which do not de­tail his vested in­ter­ests de­spite his com­men­tary on bud­gets and spend­ing.

10. Patrick Sanders

General Sir Patrick Nicholas Yardley Monrad Sanders is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer who served as Chief of the General Staff from 13 June 2022 to 15 June 2024. According to his bio on Santander, Sanders was also one of the UK’s Joint Chiefs from 2019 – 2024. According to the same bio, Sir Sanders is Strategic Defence Adviser to Santander Bank, Chair of Herminius Strategic Intelligence, which pro­vides in­de­pen­dent ad­vice and in­tel­li­gence, and has a num­ber of in­ter­na­tional ad­vi­sory roles. He also co-hosts a weekly geo-po­lit­i­cal pod­cast for The Times and The Sunday Times called ‘The General & The Journalist’. Sir Sanders is also Patron of the UK’s Afghanistan Veterans Community. Sander’s ‘booming pri­vate sec­tor ca­reer’ is de­tailed here.  Sir Sanders is quoted in an Independent ar­ti­cle dated 12 July 2025 about the Russian con­flict where he crit­i­cises the re­cent UK de­fence bud­get. There is no men­tion of his ad­vi­sory roles. Sir Sanders was re­cently quoted on Channel 4 News on 1 April 2026 as say­ing “we would be able to fight for a mat­ter of weeks and no more” in re­la­tion to the state of the UK’s de­fence. Again, he is only re­ferred to as ‘General’ and ‘former Chief of the General Staff.’

11. Richard Shirreff

General Sir Alexander Richard David Shirreff, KCB, CBE is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer. He served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe from March 2011 to 2014. Shirreff is re­port­edly an Advisory Board mem­ber of the non-for profit or­gan­i­sa­tion Genderforce, which fo­cuses on fight­ing and pre­vent­ing sex­ual and gen­der based vi­o­lence in con­flict and post-con­flict sit­u­a­tions, and he is a found­ing part­ner of Strategia Worldwide, a risk man­age­ment con­sul­tancy founded in 2016. He also joined GLOBESEC’s Future Security Defence Council in February 2023. Other po­si­tions held in­clude Executive Vice Chairman at Sigma7 Global Risk Outcomes from May to December 2022; mem­ber of the Public Service Advisory Council for Fortinet Security Network from July 2022 to January 2025.  He also holds two other cur­rent po­si­tions, ac­cord­ing to his LinkedIn. These are: Co Managing Partner at Tailings Protect, a min­ing safety com­pany, from September 2021 and Co Managing Partner at Montt Strategia International, which is a joint ven­ture be­tween a Chilean min­ing con­sul­tancy and le­gal group and Strategia Worldwide, from March 2020. Shirreff is widely quoted in the me­dia. For ex­am­ple, he writes about “How the West will come to a bloody end in World War 3 …” in a Daily Mail up­dated on 18 September 2025, with his by­line, “General Richard Shirreff”. Similar sen­ti­ments can be found in a Mirror ar­ti­cle dated 22 March 2025. He is also quoted in a Telegraph ar­ti­cle dated 15 December 2025, co-au­thored with Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, about spend­ing on de­fence and only dis­closed as, “General Sir Richard Shirreff is a for­mer Deputy Supreme Commander Europe, NATO”. In a Times Radio seg­ment in January 2026, Shirreff was in­tro­duced to au­di­ences pri­mar­ily through his for­mer rank and NATO role while urg­ing Europe and Canada to “call the bluff” by putting British troops into Greenland to de­ter “any ag­gres­sion, whether Russian, Chinese, or in­deed, American”, de­scrib­ing this ap­proach as “absolutely the fu­ture of NATO.” In that fram­ing, there is no mean­ing­ful dis­clo­sure of his post-mil­i­tary port­fo­lio, de­spite him be­ing a found­ing part­ner of Strategia Worldwide, a risk-man­age­ment con­sul­tancy, along­side other ad­vi­sory and com­mer­cial roles in the se­cu­rity and risk ecosys­tem. Again in a self-au­thored Daily Mail ar­ti­cle dated 8 January 2026 on Britain not hav­ing the money or man­power to stand by Ukraine long-term, he is only re­ferred to as General and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO.

12. Sir Peter Wall

General Sir Peter Anthony Wall, GCB, CBE, DL is a re­tired British Army of­fi­cer who served as the Chief of the General Staff, the pro­fes­sional head of the British Army, un­til September 2014. According to his LinkedIn About sec­tion, Wall is “now Director of Amicus, a strate­gic lead­er­ship con­sul­tancy, spe­cial­iz­ing in im­part­ing mil­i­tary lead­er­ship and or­gan­i­sa­tional tech­niques in the com­mer­cial world … Peter is a di­rec­tor of the General Dynamics Corporation and Chairman of FGP Group, a pre­ci­sion en­gi­neer­ing busi­ness in SW England. He is President of Combat Stress, the UK mil­i­tary men­tal health char­ity.” Wall is quoted in a Feb 2026 LBC piece ad­vo­cat­ing for in­creased de­fence spend­ing; only his mil­i­tary and Combat Stress roles are dis­closed.

13. Ben Wallace

Sir Robert Ben Lobban Wallace is a British politi­cian and for­mer British Army Officer who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 2019 to 2023. Wallace is a Partner at BOKA Capital, an in­vest­ment firm help­ing guide in­vest­ment de­ci­sions into tech sec­tors rel­e­vant to de­fence and na­tional se­cu­rity; and a Senior Adviser at CTRD Ltd, a con­sul­tancy work­ing on re­form, gov­er­nance and se­cu­rity for clients in­clud­ing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is also a Non-executive Director at Advanced Innergy Holdings since April 2025. Wallace is quoted only as ‘former Defence Secretary’ in a Telegraph ar­ti­cle dated 7 August 2025, about the Russian Ukrainian con­flict. Similarly, in a London Loves Business ar­ti­cle dated 8 January 2026, Wallace is re­ferred to as ‘Conservative de­fence sec­re­tary’ when dis­cussing that the British Army is not strong enough to serve on op­er­a­tions to de­fend Ukraine. And again, on 20 January 2026, Wallace is re­ferred to as ‘former de­fence sec­re­tary’ in a ukdj ar­ti­cle re mod­ern war­fare strain­ing mil­i­tary data se­cu­rity.

14. Alan West

Alan William John West, Baron West of Spithead, GCB, DSC, PC is a re­tired ad­mi­ral of the Royal Navy and for­merly, from June 2007 to May 2010, a Labour Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the British Home Office with re­spon­si­bil­ity for se­cu­rity, and a se­cu­rity ad­vi­sor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. According to the Parliamentary Register of Interests, he is Chairman at Spearfish Security Ltd, which is a risk man­age­ment or­gan­i­sa­tion for groups work­ing in “fragile en­vi­ron­ments and con­flict ar­eas”; Non-executive Director at MCM Solutions, which han­dles the man­age­ment and ex­trac­tion of data from dig­i­tal and non-dig­i­tal sources; and a Member of the Advisory Board at Kraken Technology Group Ltd, a mar­itime in­no­va­tion tech com­pany.  He also has share­hold­ings in Security Exhibitions Ltd and Response Exhibitions Ltd. It is noted that as a mem­ber of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces he at­tends reg­u­lar meet­ings at which the value of the hos­pi­tal­ity re­ceived over the course of a cal­en­dar year ex­ceeds the reg­is­tra­tion thresh­old of £300. West is also a mem­ber of the House of Lords Defence Group and at­tends reg­u­lar meet­ings at which the value of the hos­pi­tal­ity re­ceived over the course of a cal­en­dar year ex­ceeds the reg­is­tra­tion thresh­old of £300. Baron West is quoted in a Nation Cymru ar­ti­cle dated 31 October 2025 say­ing, “What is needed now is com­mit­ment to ma­jor arms sup­plies and long-range weapons. … The im­por­tant mes­sage to Putin, I think, is also de­liv­ered  through NATO in­creas­ing de­fence spend­ing.” No men­tion is made of his var­i­ous vested in­ter­ests. Similarly, in a London Loves Business ar­ti­cle dated 4 March 2026, Baron West is quoted as Baron and for­mer first Sea Lord re­gard­ing his con­cern over the ‘parlous state of the Royal Navy’.

15. Penny Mordaunt

A slightly dif­fer­ent but still rel­e­vant ex­am­ple comes with Dame Penny Mordaunt, an ex Royal Navy Reservist from 2010 – 2019, with an hon­orary rank of Commander awarded in 2019, and an hon­orary rank of Captain awarded in 2021. Dame Mordaunt is most recog­nised as a for­mer British Politician who served as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons from 2022 un­til 2024. She was the MP for Portsmouth North from 2010 to 2024 and as a mem­ber of the Conservative Party, she ran for the party lead­er­ship in 2022, los­ing to Liz Truss. In the 2024 gen­eral elec­tion, Dame Penny lost her Portsmouth North seat to Labour’s Amanda Martin. Dame Penny be­gan a paid part-time role with British American Tobacco in April 2025, and be­came the new chair of the board of de­fence mar­itime tech­nol­ogy com­pany, Sub Sea Craft (SSC), in January of the same year. The an­nounce­ment state­ment on SSC’s web­site reads:  “British ad­vanced mar­itime tech­nol­ogy com­pany SubSea Craft (SSC) has an­nounced the ap­point­ment of for­mer Secretary of State for Defence and Leader of the House of Commons, the Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt, as its new com­pany Chair. The ap­point­ment fol­lows the an­nounce­ment of the de­fence start-up’s sec­ond in­ter­na­tional part­ner­ship for over­seas man­u­fac­ture sup­port. Having re­cently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Athens-based Skaramangas Shipyards, the com­pany is look­ing to es­tab­lish a foothold in Europe to pro­vide the Hellenic Navy and NATO al­lies with stronger ac­cess to its mar­itime tech­nol­ogy, in­clud­ing its flag­ship covert sub­mersible craft, VICTA.” Dame Penny is quoted in a Sun Article from 15 June 2025 as ‘Former Navy Reservist’ warn­ing the con­se­quence will be ‘incalculably grave’ if the gov­ern­ment does not open up the trea­sury purse. She told The Sun, “I’m con­fi­dent if you pre­pare for war, you in­vest in it, you train for it, then con­flicts don’t start”. No men­tion is made of her rel­e­vant ap­point­ment at SSC.

16. Greg Bagwell

Gregory Bagwell CBE is a re­tired se­nior Royal Air Force Commander who served as Deputy Commander (Operations) at RAF Air Command. He was in ser­vice from 1981 to 2016. According to LinkedIn, he was Strategic Advisor, Executive Vice President Business Development, Employer Pension Trustee, and Executive Director from July 2017 to October 2025 all at Cobham. Cobham is a global tech­nol­ogy and ser­vices com­pany spe­cial­is­ing in aero­space and de­fence. Bagwell has also served as Advisor at Ultra Electronics Group from November 2023 to October 2025, and is cur­rently Partnerships Director at NATS from October 2022 (the UK’s lead­ing provider of air traf­fic con­trol ser­vices), President of the Air and Space Power Association (ASPA) from November 2016, and most re­cently, Chief Executive & Senior Consultant at Defence Insights Ltd (from October 2025). Air Marshall Bagwell is quoted reg­u­larly in var­i­ous out­lets, with­out men­tion of the above roles. For ex­am­ple, he is quoted in The Standard on 5 March 2022; ‘Former Air Marshal Greg Bagwell said a no-fly zone could be run by the United Nations, rather than NATO.’ He is also quoted in the Defense Mirror on 31 March 2025; ‘Retired British Air Marshal Greg Bagwell has shot down fears of a U.S. “kill switch” dis­abling al­lied F-35 jets but cau­tioned that heavy re­liance on American sup­pli­ers could slowly erode their com­bat readi­ness.’ On 13 January 2026, he is again re­ferred to as ’ex-RAF Air Marshal” in an iPa­per ar­ti­cle re how Britain could help Trump in re­la­tion to strikes on Iran. No men­tion of his Cobham or Defence Insights roles are made.

17. Richard Barrons

Sir Richard Barrons is a re­tired British Army Officer, who served as the Commander of Joint Forces Command from April 2013 un­til his re­tire­ment in April 2016. He is cur­rently the founder and co-chair­man of Universal Defence and Security Solutions (UDSS), a London-based strate­gic con­sul­tancy and ad­vi­sory firm that pro­vides mil­i­tary, gov­ern­ment, and cor­po­rate se­cu­rity ser­vices glob­ally. USDD is a mem­ber of ADS; the UK trade as­so­ci­a­tion ad­vanc­ing lead­er­ship in aero­space, de­fence, se­cu­rity and space, to en­able pros­per­ity and growth. Importantly, the ADS Manifesto calls on the UK gov­ern­ment to treat de­fence spend­ing not just as a se­cu­rity im­per­a­tive but as a strate­gic eco­nomic in­vest­ment. It might also be noted that Mark Poffley, di­rec­tor at Elbit Systems UK (weapons firm), sits on the board at UDSS. Sir Richard had an ad­vi­sory role on the gov­ern­ment 2025 UK Strategic Defence Review. In this role he con­sulted with the in­dus­try, in­clud­ing Lockheed Martin, to shape rec­om­men­da­tions for UK de­fence and pro­cure­ment pri­or­i­ties. In sev­eral par­lia­men­tary hear­ings, Sir Richard has dis­cussed analy­sis pro­vided by Lockheed Martin. Sir Richard can be found pro­vid­ing com­men­tary in a Times ar­ti­cle dated 3 May 2026, warn­ing ‘that a lack of (defence) in­vest­ment was “depleting” the in­dus­trial base and dri­ving de­fence firms abroad.’ He also stated that the MoD should be given £10 bil­lion ex­tra a year. He is re­ferred to only as a for­mer mil­i­tary chief and General. Sir Richard also self-au­thored a Sun ar­ti­cle dated 11 April 2026 ar­gu­ing for the need to find an­other £10 bil­lion a year for de­fence. Again, he is re­ferred to only as General, for­mer Commander of Joint Forces Command, and co-au­thor of the gov­ern­men­t’s Strategic Defence Review, with no men­tion of his promi­nent role at UDSS.

18. Tim Collins

Tim Collins is a re­tired Colonel from the British Army. He is best known for the eve-of-bat­tle speech be­fore the Iraq War in 2003, which was widely re­ported. He is cur­rently the chair­man and co-founder of in­tel­li­gence-based se­cu­rity ser­vices com­pany Horus Security Consultancy Ltd which works ex­ten­sively in the de­fence sec­tor. Their ser­vices in this area are tai­lored to gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary clients. He also un­suc­cess­fully stood for the Ulster Unionist Party in the seat of North Down in the 2024 United Kingdom gen­eral elec­tion. Colonel Collins self-au­thored an ipa­per ar­ti­cle dated 12 December 2025 re ‘the state of our weapon­ry’. He says ‘ammunition stocks are low and not be­ing re­plen­ished. Britain no longer pos­sesses the in­dus­trial depth to re­fill these stores and must com­pete in in­ter­na­tional mar­kets at in­flated prices, the cost of which our de­fence bud­get can­not sus­tain.’ No men­tion is made of his vested in­ter­ests — he is just quoted as ‘Retired British Army colonel, speaker and au­thor’. In an­other self-au­thored Telegraph Article dated 20 November 2025, Colonel Collins writes about the ‘pitiable con­di­tion’ of the Army and SAS, with no men­tion of his cur­rent yet highly rel­e­vant pri­vate-sec­tor role.

19. Richard Dannatt

Richard (Baron) Dannatt is a re­tired se­nior British Army of­fi­cer (Chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009) and mem­ber of the House of Lords. He be­came a paid ad­viser to the US de­fence com­pany Teledyne Technologies in 2022. This Guardian ar­ti­cle notes the con­cern re Dannatt’s in­put into the Palestine Action in­ves­ti­ga­tion af­ter the group tar­geted a Teledyne fac­tory in Wales. In 2012, Lord Dannatt was recorded of­fer­ing to lobby Bernard Gray re­gard­ing drone sales to the UK mil­i­tary on be­half of a South Korean com­pany. This of­fer was part of an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into for­mer of­fi­cials us­ing con­tacts for pri­vate de­fense con­tracts, with Dannatt later stat­ing he was only as­sess­ing prod­uct vi­a­bil­ity. Further, in March 2025 The Guardian re­ported it had filmed Dannatt telling un­der­cover re­porters he could make in­tro­duc­tions to gov­ern­ment min­is­ters for a po­ten­tial client who wanted to lobby the gov­ern­ment. Dannatt was sub­se­quently sus­pended from the House of Lords in November 2025 for four months over lob­by­ing breaches. In a re­cent GB News ar­ti­cle dated 8 March 2026, Lord Dannatt is quoted around ‘the dire state of our de­fence ca­pa­bil­i­ty’ with only ref­er­ence to his ‘ex-head of British Army’ ti­tle and no men­tion of Teledyne.

The me­di­a’s fail­ings?

As this re­port has de­tailed, AOAV’s re­search has found re­peated fail­ures by ma­jor British me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions to prop­erly dis­close the com­mer­cial in­ter­ests of re­tired se­nior mil­i­tary fig­ures pre­sented to au­di­ences as in­de­pen­dent de­fence ex­perts.

The Telegraph stood out for its re­peat­edly hav­ing pub­lished com­men­tary and opin­ion from for­mer se­nior mil­i­tary fig­ures ad­vo­cat­ing in­creased de­fence spend­ing or mil­i­tary es­ca­la­tion with­out ad­e­quately dis­clos­ing their com­mer­cial de­fence in­ter­ests. However, sim­i­lar fail­ures also ap­peared across the Daily Mail, Express, The Independent, iPa­per, The Sun, LBC, Sky News, Times Radio, and Channel 4 News.

Importantly, the miss­ing in­for­ma­tion was rarely dif­fi­cult to ob­tain. Most af­fil­i­a­tions were eas­ily and pub­licly avail­able through com­pany web­sites, par­lia­men­tary reg­is­ters, LinkedIn pro­files, or Companies House fil­ings. The is­sue is not that these vet­er­ans have ever hide their cor­po­ra­tion af­fil­i­a­tions. The is­sue is more a fail­ure of ed­i­to­r­ial scrutiny.

AOAV’s Recommendations

Transparency in re­port­ing is cru­cial to pub­lic trust. While for­mer mil­i­tary lead­ers bring valu­able ex­per­tise, undis­closed roles or in­ter­ests can un­der­mine cred­i­bil­ity and re­li­a­bil­ity.

Media or­gan­i­sa­tions can ad­dress this by:

Introducing manda­tory in­dus­try dis­clo­sure for all mil­i­tary com­men­ta­torsJour­nal­ists should have a knee-jerk process of dis­clos­ing any sig­nif­i­cant and rel­e­vant cur­rent roles in­clud­ing di­rec­tor­ships, ad­vi­sory po­si­tions, or fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests when quot­ing from se­nior mil­i­tary of­fi­cers as ex­pert com­men­ta­tors on de­fence and se­cu­rity mat­ters.

Strengthening ed­i­to­r­ial due dili­gence process­es­Ba­sic back­ground checks us­ing read­ily avail­able open-source in­for­ma­tion (as demon­strated within this re­port) should be em­bed­ded as stan­dard ed­i­to­r­ial prac­tice when com­mis­sion­ing de­fence and se­cu­rity com­men­ta­tors. The onus, in other words, should be on the jour­nal­ist, not the in­ter­vie­wee, to­wards dis­clo­sure.

Actively broad­en­ing the pool of voices be­yond mil­i­tary fig­ures­Me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions should broaden the range of voices in their de­fence re­port­ing to avoid al­le­ga­tions of bias and to en­sure a more bal­anced pub­lic de­bate.

Did you find this story in­ter­est­ing? Please sup­port AOAV’s work and do­nate.Do­nate

For most of AI’s his­tory, hu­mans drove every step in its de­vel­op­ment cy­cle. But at Anthropic, we are del­e­gat­ing a grow­ing share of AI de­vel­op­ment to AI sys­tems them­selves, which is speed­ing up our work.

Taken far enough, and given enough com­pute, that trend points to an AI sys­tem ca­pa­ble of fully au­tonomously de­sign­ing and de­vel­op­ing its own suc­ces­sor. This is called re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment. We are not there yet, and re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment is not in­evitable. But it could come sooner than most in­sti­tu­tions are pre­pared for.

Using pub­lic bench­marks and pre­vi­ously un­re­ported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is show­ing that AI is al­ready ac­cel­er­at­ing the de­vel­op­ment of AI sys­tems. To take just one ex­am­ple: to­day, Anthropic en­gi­neers on av­er­age ship 8x as much code per quar­ter as they did from 2021 – 2025.

The tech­ni­cal trends dis­cussed in this piece sug­gest that AI sys­tems are go­ing to be­come much more ca­pa­ble in com­ing years. These trends have huge im­pli­ca­tions. AI that can build it­self would be a ma­jor de­vel­op­ment in the his­tory of tech­nol­ogy—one that could bring enor­mous good for the world in sci­ence, health­care, and be­yond. But full re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment also might in­crease the risks of hu­mans los­ing con­trol over AI sys­tems. If sys­tems are ca­pa­ble of fully build­ing their own suc­ces­sors, the ways we se­cure them, mon­i­tor them, and shape their be­hav­ior all grow much more im­por­tant.

2021 – 2023

Building the first Claude

In the early days, work at Anthropic looked like work at any other tech com­pany: peo­ple writ­ing code and docs on lap­tops.

2023 – 2025

Chatbots

People used early chat­bots to help with parts of the process, like gen­er­at­ing short code snip­pets and copy­ing the out­put into text ed­i­tors.

2025 – 2026

Coding agents

As the agents be­came more ca­pa­ble, they were able to write and edit code on their own, some­times en­tire files.

Today

Autonomous agents

Agents can now run code them­selves and del­e­gate hours of work to other agents.

20XX?

Closing the loop

In the fu­ture, agents could be­come ca­pa­ble enough to build and train mod­els them­selves. If this hap­pens, fu­ture ver­sions of Claude could be con­tin­u­ously im­proved by Claude it­self.

Evidence from the out­side world

The rate at which AI mod­els im­prove is ac­cel­er­at­ing. The length of tasks that they can re­li­ably com­plete on their own has been dou­bling roughly every four months, up from an ear­lier trend of dou­bling every seven months. In March 2024, Claude Opus 3 could com­plete soft­ware tasks that take hu­mans about four min­utes to com­plete. A year later, Claude Sonnet 3.7 man­aged tasks that took about an hour and a half. A year af­ter that, Claude Opus 4.6 man­aged 12-hour tasks.1 If this trend holds, tasks that take a skilled per­son days could come into range this year. In 2027, AI sys­tems could be ca­pa­ble of tasks that take a per­son weeks.

The same pat­tern ap­pears on cod­ing and re­search bench­marks. Benchmarks mea­sure the per­for­mance of mod­els in a given do­main, and they’re “saturated” when mod­els achieve close to 100% per­for­mance.2 SWE-bench is a stan­dard test of real-world soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing: it hands a model an ac­tual open-source code­base and a real bug re­port, and asks it to write a code change that fixes the is­sue and passes the pro­jec­t’s own tests. Models have gone from scor­ing in the low sin­gle dig­its to sat­u­rat­ing the bench­mark in two years.

CORE-Bench tests whether a model can re­pro­duce ex­ist­ing re­search, a pre­req­ui­site for them to con­duct orig­i­nal re­search. It gives an AI model the code and data be­hind a pub­lished pa­per, and asks it to re­run every­thing and con­firm it can repli­cate the pa­per’s re­sults. AI sys­tems went from suc­ceed­ing at re­pro­duc­ing the re­sults roughly 20% of the time in 2024 to sat­u­rat­ing the bench­mark fif­teen months later. METR, which runs the bench­mark mea­sur­ing how well mod­els can com­plete long-du­ra­tion tasks, found that Claude Mythos Preview could work for “at least” 16 hours and was “at the up­per end of what [METR] can mea­sure with­out new tasks.”

Public bench­marks say a lot about the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of these sys­tems. But they can’t re­veal the im­pact AI sys­tems are hav­ing on speed­ing up AI de­vel­op­ment it­self. For that, we need di­rect ev­i­dence from within AI com­pa­nies like Anthropic.

Evidence from within Anthropic

Building a fron­tier model takes two broad cat­e­gories of work. There is en­gi­neer­ing: writ­ing the code, stand­ing up the in­fra­struc­ture, and over­see­ing the model train­ing. And there is re­search: de­cid­ing what ex­per­i­ments to run, in­ter­pret­ing what comes back, and fig­ur­ing out which ideas to try next.

Across both en­gi­neer­ing and re­search, the pic­ture is con­sis­tent. In en­gi­neer­ing, Claude can be handed an un­der­spec­i­fied prob­lem and fig­ure out how to solve it; hu­mans sup­ply the goal, but they no longer need to sup­ply the method. In re­search, Claude can al­ready match or out­per­form skilled hu­mans at ex­e­cut­ing a well-spec­i­fied ex­per­i­ment. However, large per­for­mance gaps per­sist when it comes to Claude ex­er­cis­ing judge­ment in choos­ing goals in both en­gi­neer­ing and re­search. That’s the gap be­tween AI to­day and a fu­ture sys­tem that could au­tonomously de­sign its own suc­ces­sor.

It’s com­mon for em­ploy­ees at Anthropic to re­ceive more open-ended and im­por­tant tasks as they gain more ex­pe­ri­ence. Early on, they ex­e­cute a task some­one else spec­i­fied, like, “The ex­port but­ton is­n’t work­ing, please fix it.” With ex­pe­ri­ence, they’re handed a goal and de­sign the ap­proach them­selves, such as, “Investigate why the net­work slows down un­der heavy load.” At the most se­nior lev­els, they are de­cid­ing which prob­lems are worth work­ing on at all: “What should the team build next quar­ter?” We can use in­ter­nal Anthropic data to see how far Claude has come in be­ing able to han­dle these dif­fer­ent kinds of tasks.

Claude writes a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of Anthropic’s code. As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s code­base was au­thored by Claude.3 Before Claude Code launched in re­search pre­view in February 2025, this num­ber was in the low sin­gle dig­its. That shift also shows up in the amount of out­put per en­gi­neer. Lines of code merged per en­gi­neer per day stayed con­stant through Anthropic’s first four years (2021 – 2024), then be­gan to climb up­ward in 2025 when Claude be­gan to run code rather than just sug­gest­ing it for an en­gi­neer to copy and paste. The slope steep­ened again in 2026 when mod­els be­gan to work au­tonomously over longer time hori­zons. These two in­flec­tion points are shown in the chart be­low. In the sec­ond quar­ter of 2026, the typ­i­cal en­gi­neer was merg­ing 8× as much code per day as they were in 2024.4 This is be­cause much of the code is writ­ten by Claude, with the en­gi­neer di­rect­ing and re­view­ing, rather than typ­ing it them­selves.

A caveat: Lines of code is an im­per­fect mea­sure, as it mea­sures quan­tity over qual­ity. So 8× lines of code/​en­gi­neer/​day in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2026 is al­most cer­tainly an over­state­ment of the true pro­duc­tiv­ity gain. Nonetheless, it in­di­cates an ac­cel­er­a­tion. At Anthropic, we don’t re­ward peo­ple for how many lines of code they write; rather, team mem­bers are pro­duc­ing more code sim­ply be­cause they’re us­ing AI sys­tems to write more code.

The in­crease in lines of code writ­ten lines up with sub­jec­tive im­pres­sions of large pro­duc­tiv­ity in­creases. In a March 2026 poll of 130 em­ploy­ees from across Anthropic re­search teams, the me­dian re­spon­dent es­ti­mated that they pro­duced around 4x as much out­put with Mythos Preview as they would have with­out ac­cess to any AI mod­els, on the kinds of pro­jects they would have been work­ing on re­gard­less.5 We ex­pect that the true de­gree of up­lift in March was some­what lower.6 Nevertheless, we find the over­all claim plau­si­ble, and in line with our other ob­ser­va­tions: a sig­nif­i­cant frac­tion of Anthropic tech­ni­cal staff is ac­com­plish­ing their core work mul­ti­ple times faster than they could with­out AI as­sis­tance.

We also see ev­i­dence that peo­ple at Anthropic are us­ing Claude to do work that sim­ply would­n’t have hap­pened oth­er­wise, like build­ing ex­ploratory tool­ing and ad­dress­ing long-de­ferred cleanup. For ex­am­ple, in April 2026, Claude shipped over 800 fixes that re­duced a class of API er­rors by a fac­tor of one thou­sand. The en­gi­neer over­see­ing Claude es­ti­mated that a hu­man would have taken four years to com­plete this work; solv­ing other peo­ple’s bugs is slow and painstak­ing, and hu­mans strug­gle to hold that much un­fa­mil­iar con­text in their head at once.

I started lean­ing hard into Claudifying about a year ago. That’s been a crazy ad­ven­ture and it’s now been ~5 months since I last wrote any code my­self.

The code that Claude writes is “good” and im­prov­ing. “Good code” means two things: it works, and it is writ­ten in a man­ner that al­lows an­other en­gi­neer to un­der­stand it and build upon it. On the first cri­te­rion, the ev­i­dence is clear. The rate at which Anthropic staff cor­rect, redi­rect, or take over mid-task from Claude has been falling steadily for a year, in­clud­ing on the most com­plex and open-ended tasks. This means prob­lems with no clear spec­i­fi­ca­tion, where the en­gi­neer is­n’t sure what the an­swer looks like. This is ev­i­dent in Claude’s suc­cess rate over time on tasks of dif­fer­ent dif­fi­cul­ties, as shown in the graph be­low. Claude writes code that works.

On the most open-ended tasks, Claude’s suc­cess rate reached 76% in May 2026, up 50 per­cent­age points in six months. To give an ex­am­ple of tasks in this dif­fi­culty tier, a rou­tine up­grade be­gan crash­ing tens of thou­sands of train­ing jobs. An en­gi­neer pointed Claude at the live in­ci­dent with lit­tle more than some text con­tent and clus­ter ac­cess. Working through the run­ning jobs and test­ing one en­vi­ron­ment set­ting at a time, Claude iso­lated the sin­gle ob­scure de­bug­ging flag that was trig­ger­ing the crash, re­pro­duced it re­li­ably, and con­firmed a fix. In about two hours, Claude de­liv­ered what would nor­mally be two to three days of work.

The sec­ond cri­te­rion is writ­ing code that an­other en­gi­neer can un­der­stand and build on. Here the gap be­tween hu­mans and AI per­sists, but is clos­ing fast. There is­n’t full con­sen­sus among staff at Anthropic, but many be­lieve that the Claude-written code was still worse in qual­ity than hu­man-writ­ten code at Anthropic in late 2025, and is roughly at par­ity to­day. We ex­pect it to be bet­ter within the year.

This has changed the way that Anthropic now re­views its own code. Proposed changes to our code­base are now read by an au­to­mated Claude re­viewer that looks for bugs, se­cu­rity flaws, and other de­fects be­fore it can merge. Using this tool, we ran a ret­ro­spec­tive analy­sis, and found that an au­to­mated Claude re­view of every change to our code­base would have caught roughly a third of the bugs be­hind past in­ci­dents on claude.ai be­fore they ever reached pro­duc­tion. The en­gi­neers who wrote that code are among the best in the world at build­ing these sys­tems. Claude is now catch­ing the mis­takes that they missed.

Claude-written code was some­what worse than hu­man-writ­ten code at Anthropic in late 2025, is roughly at par­ity to­day, and we ex­pect it to be strictly bet­ter within the year.

Claude is good at run­ning ex­per­i­ments to hit a goal that some­one else has set. Every time Anthropic re­leases a model, we run the same test: we give Claude some code that trains a small AI model, and ask it to make that code run as fast as pos­si­ble while still pass­ing the same cor­rect­ness checks. The goal and the suc­cess met­rics are fixed in ad­vance, so Claude’s job is to find speedups by rewrit­ing the code, run­ning it, tim­ing it, and re­peat­ing. It’s a minia­ture ver­sion of an ex­per­i­men­tal re­search loop. In May 2025, Claude Opus 4 av­er­aged a ~3x speedup over the start­ing code. By April 2026, Claude Mythos Preview was achiev­ing ~52x. For cal­i­bra­tion, a skilled hu­man re­searcher would need four to eight hours to reach 4x.7 In this part of the re­search work­flow—op­ti­miz­ing steps within a clearly de­fined ex­per­i­ment—Claude has gone from su­per help­ful to su­per­hu­man in un­der a year.

The shape of stuff to­day is roughly ‘humans have ideas, and the mod­els are able to im­ple­ment, test and eval­u­ate them an [order of mag­ni­tude] faster than be­fore.’

Claude is get­ting bet­ter at propos­ing its own ex­per­i­ments. In April 2026, Anthropic pub­lished the first demon­stra­tion of Claude run­ning an open-ended re­search pro­ject end to end. Claude-powered agents were given an open prob­lem in AI safety—roughly, can a weaker model re­li­ably su­per­vise a stronger one?—and were left to solve it. This in­volved propos­ing hy­pothe­ses, test­ing them, shar­ing find­ings with par­al­lel agents, and it­er­at­ing. The task has a clear per­for­mance “floor” and “ceiling”: the floor is how well the weak su­per­vi­sor would do on its own; the ceil­ing is how the strong model does when trained on cor­rect an­swers. Two hu­man re­searchers, over about a week, re­cov­ered roughly 23% of that gap; the agents re­cov­ered 97% over 800 cu­mu­la­tive hours and used roughly $18,000 in com­pute. There are some caveats to this work; the re­sult did­n’t trans­fer cleanly to pro­duc­tion-scale mod­els, and hu­mans still chose the prob­lem and cre­ated the scor­ing rubric. But within those bounds, the agents de­signed every ex­per­i­ment them­selves. Direction-setting was the only mean­ing­ful role a hu­man played.

Claude did all of this with pretty min­i­mal help from me over the course of 1 – 2 days. I think if [a ju­nior col­league] came back to me with re­sults like this in the same span of time, I would be mildly im­pressed. The fu­ture is now.

Claude is get­ting bet­ter at steer­ing re­search ses­sions to­wards re­search find­ings. We ex­am­ined real Claude Code ses­sions (between January and March 2026) where Anthropic re­searchers were work­ing with Claude on an open-ended in­ves­tiga­tive prob­lem, like fig­ur­ing out why a train­ing run kept crash­ing, or why a model scored poorly on a bench­mark. In each case, we found a mo­ment where the re­searcher took a de­tour: they pur­sued a di­rec­tion that sent the ses­sion side­ways be­fore it even­tu­ally got back on track. We then showed var­i­ous Claude mod­els only the work from be­fore the ses­sion went off-course and asked what it would do next. A sep­a­rate Claude that was able to see how the ses­sion even­tu­ally turned out then judged whether the AI or the hu­man sug­gested the bet­ter next step.8

Because we de­lib­er­ately picked mo­ments (n=129) where we know the hu­man’s choice had room for im­prove­ment, this is­n’t a like-for-like com­par­i­son be­tween model and hu­man judge­ment. What these mo­ments give us is a set of re­al­is­tic, chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions where the right next step is not ob­vi­ous, and where the hu­man’s choice serves as a use­ful yard­stick to com­pare model per­for­mance over time. On this mea­sure, our best model in November 2025 (Opus 4.5) beat the hu­man choice 51% of the time; in April 2026 (Mythos Preview), this grew to 64%. The day-to-day work of re­search is largely a chain of these next-step de­ci­sions, mak­ing this a rel­e­vant mea­sure of the mod­el’s abil­ity to even­tu­ally run an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of its own. We view this re­sult as an early sig­nal that AI sys­tems are get­ting bet­ter at mak­ing the kinds of judge­ment calls that AI re­search de­pends on.

The com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage of hu­mans as of right now is still in see­ing the big­ger pic­ture and think­ing be­yond the con­fines of the im­me­di­ate task.

What might the fu­ture of work at Anthropic look like?

The ev­i­dence sug­gests that the hu­man role is nar­row­ing at each step in the AI de­vel­op­ment process. Once hu­man- and AI-authored code qual­ity reach par­ity, hu­mans will stop writ­ing code en­tirely, and shift to only re­view­ing it. But if they can’t re­view code as quickly as Claude can gen­er­ate it, hu­man re­view will be­come the bot­tle­neck to AI de­vel­op­ment. Similarly, once Claude can run ex­per­i­ments, the ques­tion shifts to­wards “Which of these ex­per­i­ments is worth run­ning?” Put sim­ply: the do­ing (i.e., writ­ing the code, run­ning the ex­per­i­ment, pro­duc­ing the re­sult) now costs al­most noth­ing in hu­man time, even if it still has costs in com­pute.

An area of hu­man com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage, for now, is re­search taste and judg­ment, in­clud­ing choos­ing which prob­lems mat­ter, which re­sults to trust, and when an ap­proach is a dead end.

Work (and life) ran on a gift econ­omy of small fa­vors be­tween hu­mans. ‘Can you help me get this script run­ning?’ […] each one cre­ated a lit­tle debt, a lit­tle mu­tual aware­ness. [Claude is] faster, it cre­ates zero debt, but each of these is a lost bid for hu­man col­lab­o­ra­tion.

On days where every­thing works well, I can’t help but think noth­ing I do mat­ters, every­thing is au­to­mated and bet­ter and faster than I ever will be. But then there are days where every­thing breaks and I don’t un­der­stand why and I re­al­ize I have no idea what I’ve been up to any­more.

What if we’re wrong?

A nat­ural ob­jec­tion to the ev­i­dence pre­sented above is that the work that is still in hu­man hands—choos­ing which prob­lems to work on—is what mat­ters most. Without that judg­ment, Claude is a ca­pa­ble as­sis­tant, but not a sys­tem that could drive AI progress on its own.

It is gen­uinely un­clear whether to­day’s train­ing meth­ods and ar­chi­tec­tures could un­lock that ca­pac­ity. But AI is rarely ad­vanced by “eureka!” mo­ments. There have been a few of these in AI’s re­cent his­tory, like the Transformer ar­chi­tec­ture, or mix­ture-of-ex­perts mod­els, but par­a­digm-shift­ing ideas ar­rive years apart. In be­tween, most progress is in­cre­men­tal: we scale some­thing up, see what breaks, fix it, and try again. That is ex­actly the kind of work­flow Claude now ex­cels at. Edison said that ge­nius is 1% in­spi­ra­tion and 99% per­spi­ra­tion. But we see per­spi­ra­tion be­com­ing in­creas­ingly au­to­mated. It’s be­com­ing clear that much of what ad­vances the fron­tier is au­tomat­able; large-scale re­search progress is mostly a func­tion of tools and re­sources, which dic­tate how fast you can run ex­per­i­ments, how many you can run at once, and how quickly you can get re­sults.

Even if we sup­pose that Claude never achieves good re­search taste, a con­ser­v­a­tive read­ing of our ev­i­dence still im­plies com­pound­ing ac­cel­er­a­tion. If hu­mans spend most of their time on the sin­gle-digit frac­tion of work that is di­rec­tion-set­ting, while Claude han­dles the rest, that means each en­gi­neer or re­searcher is steer­ing far more work than be­fore. The ev­i­dence we see sug­gests that peo­ple at Anthropic are both mov­ing faster and cov­er­ing a broader sur­face. In prac­tice, this means that AI al­ready makes Anthropic move much faster than it did be­fore the ad­vent of ef­fec­tive AI tools.

The less con­ser­v­a­tive read­ing is that the early ev­i­dence on Claude’s im­prov­ing re­search judg­ment—nar­row as it is to­day—is an in­di­ca­tor that this ca­pa­bil­ity is im­prov­ing as well. “Research taste” might be just an­other AI ca­pa­bil­ity that AI sys­tems fail at for a time, then get good at. We’ve seen a sim­i­lar pat­tern with other qual­i­ta­tive skills, like AI sys­tems be­ing able to ex­plain why a joke is funny, demon­strate the­ory of mind, and solve lin­guis­tic rid­dles.

Possible fu­tures

What hap­pens next de­pends on two things: whether the trend con­tin­ues, and what we choose to do if it does. We can imag­ine at least three fu­ture sce­nar­ios:

The trend stalls, but to­day’s AI ca­pa­bil­i­ties are widely dif­fused. This ar­ti­cle fea­tures many ex­po­nen­tial tra­jec­to­ries. But these tra­jec­to­ries may ac­tu­ally turn out to be S-curves. We may be ap­proach­ing the bend in the curve, where re­turns to scale di­min­ish and the line straight­ens, then flat­tens. The judg­ment that sep­a­rates a com­pe­tent re­searcher from a great one might be a ca­pa­bil­ity that can­not come from scal­ing up train­ing in­puts like com­pute and data. If so, get­ting past this bot­tle­neck would re­quire a new idea, like an ar­chi­tec­tural ap­proach that sup­plants the Transformer ar­chi­tec­ture that all cur­rent fron­tier mod­els use.Al­ter­nately, the bind­ing con­straint to AI progress could be in the sup­ply chain, not the model: ad­vanc­ing and dif­fus­ing the fron­tier may re­quire more en­ergy and com­pute than presently ex­ists. The pace of chip fab­ri­ca­tion, grid ex­pan­sion, or in­ter­con­nect band­width may be the con­straint, rather than in­tel­li­gence it­self. We also can­not rule out an ex­oge­nous shock to the AI ecosys­tem that dra­mat­i­cally slows things, like a sud­den di­min­ish­ment in the sup­ply of com­pute or elec­tric­ity, ei­ther of which would slow progress and make for­ward in­vest­ment by labs more ex­pen­sive. Or we may not be an­tic­i­pat­ing some other bar­rier to progress.Even if model ca­pa­bil­i­ties were frozen at to­day’s level, we would ex­pect ma­jor changes to oc­cur in the world. Project Glasswing is one early sign: in its first weeks, Mythos Preview found more than ten thou­sand high- and crit­i­cal-sever­ity soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties across the world’s most im­por­tant sys­tems—enough that the bot­tle­neck in cy­ber de­fense has al­ready shifted from find­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to patch­ing them fast enough. And we are still early in the dif­fu­sion of to­day’s mod­els into the wider econ­omy, where a 100-person com­pany can in­creas­ingly do the work of a 1,000-person one, be­cause each em­ployee will sit atop a pyra­mid of agents.We in­clude this sce­nario for com­plete­ness, but we don’t be­lieve it’s likely. Every ca­pa­bil­ity we can mea­sure, in­clud­ing those that feel “squishier,” like qual­ity of code and suc­cess on open-ended tasks, has so far fol­lowed the same curve. We have not yet seen that curve bend. Of the three fu­tures we con­sider, this one would give gov­ern­ments and so­ci­eties the most time to adapt. We are more wor­ried about the next two, which would move faster and leave far less room for prepa­ra­tion.

Alternately, the bind­ing con­straint to AI progress could be in the sup­ply chain, not the model: ad­vanc­ing and dif­fus­ing the fron­tier may re­quire more en­ergy and com­pute than presently ex­ists. The pace of chip fab­ri­ca­tion, grid ex­pan­sion, or in­ter­con­nect band­width may be the con­straint, rather than in­tel­li­gence it­self. We also can­not rule out an ex­oge­nous shock to the AI ecosys­tem that dra­mat­i­cally slows things, like a sud­den di­min­ish­ment in the sup­ply of com­pute or elec­tric­ity, ei­ther of which would slow progress and make for­ward in­vest­ment by labs more ex­pen­sive. Or we may not be an­tic­i­pat­ing some other bar­rier to progress.

Even if model ca­pa­bil­i­ties were frozen at to­day’s level, we would ex­pect ma­jor changes to oc­cur in the world. Project Glasswing is one early sign: in its first weeks, Mythos Preview found more than ten thou­sand high- and crit­i­cal-sever­ity soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties across the world’s most im­por­tant sys­tems—enough that the bot­tle­neck in cy­ber de­fense has al­ready shifted from find­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to patch­ing them fast enough. And we are still early in the dif­fu­sion of to­day’s mod­els into the wider econ­omy, where a 100-person com­pany can in­creas­ingly do the work of a 1,000-person one, be­cause each em­ployee will sit atop a pyra­mid of agents.

We in­clude this sce­nario for com­plete­ness, but we don’t be­lieve it’s likely. Every ca­pa­bil­ity we can mea­sure, in­clud­ing those that feel “squishier,” like qual­ity of code and suc­cess on open-ended tasks, has so far fol­lowed the same curve. We have not yet seen that curve bend. Of the three fu­tures we con­sider, this one would give gov­ern­ments and so­ci­eties the most time to adapt. We are more wor­ried about the next two, which would move faster and leave far less room for prepa­ra­tion.

AI labs con­tinue to see com­pound­ing ef­fi­ciency gains. In this sce­nario, AI de­vel­op­ment be­comes sub­stan­tially au­to­mated, but hu­mans con­tinue to set re­search di­rec­tions and judge re­sults. Organizations that use AI sys­tems would be­come much more ef­fi­cient as time goes on, so we could ex­pect to see sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tiv­ity mul­ti­pli­ers on each per­son in this or­ga­ni­za­tion. 100-person com­pa­nies could do the work of 10,000- or 100,000-person or­ga­ni­za­tions. This would rev­o­lu­tion­ize knowl­edge work and gov­ern­ment ser­vices, but could also be turned to harm­ful ends, from au­thor­i­tar­ian sur­veil­lance of whole pop­u­la­tions to in­flu­ence op­er­a­tions that tai­lor ma­nip­u­la­tion to each in­di­vid­ual and run at a scale no hu­man team could match. The role of hu­mans at com­pa­nies like Anthropic would shift. People would part­ner with AI sys­tems to scale up re­search and gen­er­ate new in­sights, and to­gether they would build the sys­tems needed to ver­ify that AI out­puts can be trusted.The ev­i­dence we’ve laid out here sug­gests that we’re likely head­ing into this sce­nario. But speed­ing up one part of a process of­ten just shifts the bot­tle­neck else­where: over­all pace is capped by the parts that haven’t sped up. In com­put­ing, this is known as Amdahl’s law, and the same logic can ap­ply to or­ga­ni­za­tions. Anthropic has al­ready en­coun­tered one sig­na­ture of Amdahl’s law: as we’ve be­gun to push more code around the or­ga­ni­za­tion, hu­man code re­view has be­come a new bot­tle­neck.We’ve also en­coun­tered this fric­tion out­side en­gi­neer­ing. There has been an ex­plo­sion of new ideas, ini­tia­tives, tools, and sim­u­la­tions, as a re­sult of Anthropic em­ploy­ees work­ing with highly ca­pa­ble mod­els—far more than we have the ca­pac­ity to pur­sue. The rate at which or­ga­ni­za­tions can spot and fix these bot­tle­necks may be a skill that im­proves over time, and it may be­come the most im­por­tant skill for any or­ga­ni­za­tion.

The ev­i­dence we’ve laid out here sug­gests that we’re likely head­ing into this sce­nario. But speed­ing up one part of a process of­ten just shifts the bot­tle­neck else­where: over­all pace is capped by the parts that haven’t sped up. In com­put­ing, this is known as Amdahl’s law, and the same logic can ap­ply to or­ga­ni­za­tions. Anthropic has al­ready en­coun­tered one sig­na­ture of Amdahl’s law: as we’ve be­gun to push more code around the or­ga­ni­za­tion, hu­man code re­view has be­come a new bot­tle­neck.

We’ve also en­coun­tered this fric­tion out­side en­gi­neer­ing. There has been an ex­plo­sion of new ideas, ini­tia­tives, tools, and sim­u­la­tions, as a re­sult of Anthropic em­ploy­ees work­ing with highly ca­pa­ble mod­els—far more than we have the ca­pac­ity to pur­sue. The rate at which or­ga­ni­za­tions can spot and fix these bot­tle­necks may be a skill that im­proves over time, and it may be­come the most im­por­tant skill for any or­ga­ni­za­tion.

AI sys­tems them­selves be­come ca­pa­ble of full re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment, and be­gin build­ing their suc­ces­sors. If tech­ni­cal trends in ad­vanc­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties con­tinue, and AI sys­tems are able to de­velop the ca­pa­bil­i­ties in­her­ent to trans­for­ma­tive hu­man in­ge­nu­ity, then it is plau­si­ble that AI sys­tems could de­sign and re­fine them­selves.In this world, the pace of progress in AI de­vel­op­ment be­comes de­ter­mined en­tirely by the avail­abil­ity of com­pute (or the speed of dis­cov­er­ing var­i­ous ef­fi­cien­cies in al­go­rith­mic train­ing or in­fer­ence) for AI sys­tems. Humans play a sub­stan­tially di­min­ished role in their de­vel­op­ment, likely mov­ing most of our ef­fort to­wards over­sight, val­i­da­tion, and ver­i­fi­ca­tion of an ex­pand­ing “virtual lab” run by AI sys­tems. We ex­pect that sys­tems ca­pa­ble of au­to­mated AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment would have skills that would trans­fer to the rest of sci­ence, al­low­ing them to be­gin to rev­o­lu­tion­ize other fields.How the align­ment prob­lem gets solved—or not—in this fu­ture is some­thing we are least cer­tain about. Models could prove to be suf­fi­ciently aligned and ca­pa­ble enough of re­search taste that they dis­cover and im­ple­ment novel so­lu­tions that we have not yet reached. They could also be suf­fi­ciently wise to halt de­vel­op­ment if not. Alternatively, the rare oc­cur­rences of mis­align­ment pre­sent in to­day’s mod­els could com­pound as the mod­els build their suc­ces­sors, grow­ing more fre­quent but less un­der­stood un­til we lose con­trol of them. It’s pos­si­ble that we can’t build, in­te­grate, and ver­ify the tools that we’d need to un­der­stand which trend­line we are ac­tu­ally on.We do not have good in­tu­itions for what this world would look like, be­cause our econ­omy is cur­rently dri­ven by hu­mans and hu­man-built tools. By its na­ture, a world dri­ven by fast re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment could be­come dom­i­nated by the self-im­prov­ing model as its ca­pa­bil­i­ties fully eclipse those of hu­mans and the model pro­lif­er­ates across the broader econ­omy. It is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict what the econ­omy looks like if hu­man la­bor stops be­ing com­pet­i­tive.Even if model de­vel­op­ment be­came fully au­to­mated and re­cur­sive, we can’t pre­dict what that would mean for most hu­mans’ daily lives. Amdahl’s law ap­plies here as well. Recursive in­tel­li­gence could lead to achiev­ing many of the ben­e­fits out­lined in Machines of Loving Grace, quickly in some do­mains. We ex­pect that em­bod­ied in­tel­li­gence (i.e., ro­bot­ics) might quickly fol­low re­cur­sive in­tel­li­gence, and fol­low a sim­i­lar path of in­creas­ing re­turns at de­creas­ing cost. More pow­er­ful in­tel­li­gence might help us build things in the phys­i­cal world more quickly, run more pro­duc­tive clin­i­cal tri­als of life­sav­ing drugs, and de­velop novel forms of co­or­di­na­tion.But achiev­ing re­cur­sive im­prove­ment alone does not sug­gest an im­me­di­ate change in how in­dus­trial pro­duc­tion oc­curs, so­ci­eties or­ga­nize, or mar­kets func­tion. More in­tel­li­gence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elec­tions sooner than a con­sti­tu­tion dic­tates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a week­end. For most peo­ple, the felt pace of this fu­ture will still be set by the bot­tle­necks, even if the lab­o­ra­tory up­stream runs at the speed of com­pute. That col­li­sion, where re­cur­sive in­tel­li­gence build­ing it­self ever faster meets the world of hu­mans, re­la­tion­ships, and gov­er­nance, is an­other part of this fu­ture we can’t pre­dict.

In this world, the pace of progress in AI de­vel­op­ment be­comes de­ter­mined en­tirely by the avail­abil­ity of com­pute (or the speed of dis­cov­er­ing var­i­ous ef­fi­cien­cies in al­go­rith­mic train­ing or in­fer­ence) for AI sys­tems. Humans play a sub­stan­tially di­min­ished role in their de­vel­op­ment, likely mov­ing most of our ef­fort to­wards over­sight, val­i­da­tion, and ver­i­fi­ca­tion of an ex­pand­ing “virtual lab” run by AI sys­tems. We ex­pect that sys­tems ca­pa­ble of au­to­mated AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment would have skills that would trans­fer to the rest of sci­ence, al­low­ing them to be­gin to rev­o­lu­tion­ize other fields.

How the align­ment prob­lem gets solved—or not—in this fu­ture is some­thing we are least cer­tain about. Models could prove to be suf­fi­ciently aligned and ca­pa­ble enough of re­search taste that they dis­cover and im­ple­ment novel so­lu­tions that we have not yet reached. They could also be suf­fi­ciently wise to halt de­vel­op­ment if not. Alternatively, the rare oc­cur­rences of mis­align­ment pre­sent in to­day’s mod­els could com­pound as the mod­els build their suc­ces­sors, grow­ing more fre­quent but less un­der­stood un­til we lose con­trol of them. It’s pos­si­ble that we can’t build, in­te­grate, and ver­ify the tools that we’d need to un­der­stand which trend­line we are ac­tu­ally on.

We do not have good in­tu­itions for what this world would look like, be­cause our econ­omy is cur­rently dri­ven by hu­mans and hu­man-built tools. By its na­ture, a world dri­ven by fast re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment could be­come dom­i­nated by the self-im­prov­ing model as its ca­pa­bil­i­ties fully eclipse those of hu­mans and the model pro­lif­er­ates across the broader econ­omy. It is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict what the econ­omy looks like if hu­man la­bor stops be­ing com­pet­i­tive.

Even if model de­vel­op­ment be­came fully au­to­mated and re­cur­sive, we can’t pre­dict what that would mean for most hu­mans’ daily lives. Amdahl’s law ap­plies here as well. Recursive in­tel­li­gence could lead to achiev­ing many of the ben­e­fits out­lined in Machines of Loving Grace, quickly in some do­mains. We ex­pect that em­bod­ied in­tel­li­gence (i.e., ro­bot­ics) might quickly fol­low re­cur­sive in­tel­li­gence, and fol­low a sim­i­lar path of in­creas­ing re­turns at de­creas­ing cost. More pow­er­ful in­tel­li­gence might help us build things in the phys­i­cal world more quickly, run more pro­duc­tive clin­i­cal tri­als of life­sav­ing drugs, and de­velop novel forms of co­or­di­na­tion.

But achiev­ing re­cur­sive im­prove­ment alone does not sug­gest an im­me­di­ate change in how in­dus­trial pro­duc­tion oc­curs, so­ci­eties or­ga­nize, or mar­kets func­tion. More in­tel­li­gence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elec­tions sooner than a con­sti­tu­tion dic­tates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a week­end. For most peo­ple, the felt pace of this fu­ture will still be set by the bot­tle­necks, even if the lab­o­ra­tory up­stream runs at the speed of com­pute. That col­li­sion, where re­cur­sive in­tel­li­gence build­ing it­self ever faster meets the world of hu­mans, re­la­tion­ships, and gov­er­nance, is an­other part of this fu­ture we can’t pre­dict.

What should we do?

If it were pos­si­ble to ef­fec­tively slow the de­vel­op­ment of this tech­nol­ogy to give our­selves more time to deal with its im­mense im­pli­ca­tions, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slow­down sim­ply lets the least cau­tious ac­tors catch up tech­no­log­i­cally, it could leave every­one less safe. Without a global co­or­di­na­tion mech­a­nism, com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments will have to make dif­fi­cult de­ci­sions about safety while un­der com­pet­i­tive and geopo­lit­i­cal pres­sures.

We be­lieve it would be good for the world to have the op­tion to slow or tem­porar­ily pause fron­tier AI de­vel­op­ment to en­able so­ci­etal struc­tures and align­ment re­search to keep up with the ad­vance of the tech­nol­ogy. The Anthropic Institute will con­duct re­search—in col­lab­o­ra­tion with many oth­ers—and take ac­tions to help build the sys­tems that a cred­i­ble slow­down or pause would re­quire. These sys­tems would en­able fron­tier AI de­vel­op­ers to ver­ify that oth­ers glob­ally have ac­tu­ally stopped or slowed, and that a bad ac­tor could not use the aus­pices of a co­or­di­nated slow­down to jump ahead in se­cret. If such sys­tems ex­isted, we ex­pect that we would slow down or tem­porar­ily pause, if other de­vel­op­ers at or near the fron­tier also did so in a ver­i­fi­able man­ner.

A mean­ing­ful slow­down or pause would re­quire mul­ti­ple well-re­sourced labs at or near the fron­tier, in mul­ti­ple coun­tries, agree­ing to stop un­der the same con­di­tions. It would also re­quire that each can ver­ify that the oth­ers have ac­tu­ally stopped. Due to the unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of AI sys­tems, the de­tectabil­ity (a lower stan­dard than ver­i­fi­a­bil­ity) el­e­ment of this arms con­trol prob­lem is much more chal­leng­ing than with other tech­nolo­gies. Training runs are far eas­ier to con­ceal than mis­sile si­los, their in­puts are gen­eral-pur­pose, and the in­cen­tive to de­fect qui­etly is enor­mous, be­cause who­ever con­tin­ues while oth­ers pause could in­herit the lead. A cred­i­ble pause also has to spec­ify what trig­gers it, what lifts it, and who ad­ju­di­cates.

None of this is nec­es­sar­ily im­pos­si­ble in prin­ci­ple—the world has built ver­i­fi­ca­tion regimes for other com­plex tech­nolo­gies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the in­fra­struc­ture and the trust. We don’t have that long. A uni­lat­eral pause by one lab, by con­trast, is achiev­able im­me­di­ately, but ac­com­plishes much less: it would change who the front-run­ner is, but it would not cre­ate the wider de­lib­er­a­tive process that is cur­rently miss­ing.

In the com­ing months, we will or­ga­nize con­ver­sa­tions where pol­i­cy­mak­ers, re­searchers, civil so­ci­ety, and other AI com­pa­nies can help an­swer some of the ques­tions this piece raises, es­pe­cially around full re­cur­sive self-im­prove­ment and how to cre­ate bet­ter op­tions for co­or­di­na­tion and de­lib­er­a­tion. We’ll pub­lish what comes out of it. The win­dow to in­ves­ti­gate the ques­tions to­gether is here, and peo­ple out­side AI com­pa­nies should be in­volved in this de­lib­er­a­tion.

Marina Favaro and Jack Clark co-au­thored this piece, with ed­i­to­r­ial sup­port from Santi Ruiz. Shan Carter, Romello Goodman, and Nikki Makagiansar cre­ated the vi­su­als from data col­lected by Brian Calvert and Jun Shern Chan. Daniel Freeman, Jim Baker, Max Young, Sarah Pollack, Francesco Mosconi, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Jones, Kevin Troy, Anton Korinek, Meg Tong, Andrew Ho, Dan Altman, Drake Thomas, Jack Shen, Sasha de Marigny, and Avital Balwit pro­vided feed­back.

METR’s key mea­sure tells you the time hori­zon over which AI sys­tems can be 50% re­li­able at a bas­ket of tasks, though the trend­line looks the same at 80% re­li­a­bil­ity.

Especially as they shift to­ward more open-ended for­mats and more dif­fi­cult tasks (e.g., Olympiad-level math­e­mat­ics), bench­marks of­ten sat­u­rate be­low 100% due to er­rors in the ques­tion and an­swer sets like am­bigu­ous prob­lem state­ments and un­solv­able ques­tions.

Anthropic lead­er­ship have pub­licly es­ti­mated that 90% or more of our code is writ­ten by Claude, in­clud­ing scripts and ex­per­i­men­tal code. Our >80% fig­ure mea­sures the share of lines merged to pro­duc­tion that can be at­trib­uted to Claude. This is a more con­ser­v­a­tive mea­sure­ment in two ways: our at­tri­bu­tion pipeline has gaps, and the lines not at­trib­uted to Claude in­clude auto-gen­er­ated code and other ar­ti­facts that were not hand-writ­ten by hu­mans ei­ther.

This surge in code pro­duc­tion is strain­ing the in­fra­struc­ture every­one shares. GitHub—the plat­form most of the world’s soft­ware is built on—saw roughly one bil­lion code com­mits in all of 2025; by mid-2026 it saw 275 mil­lion a week, on pace for roughly 14 bil­lion over the year. The com­pa­ny’s COO has said that it is “pushing in­cred­i­bly hard” on ca­pac­ity just to keep up.

Additional de­tails on the method­ol­ogy of this sur­vey are dis­cussed in sec­tion 2.3.5 of the Claude Opus 4.7 System Card.

Many re­spon­dents may not have thought care­fully about how to ac­count for var­i­ous bi­ases or sub­tleties in the ques­tion de­f­i­n­i­tion, and re­cent re­search by METR shows that de­vel­oper es­ti­mates of AI pro­duc­tiv­ity up­lift can be over­es­ti­mated.

How large the speedup gets de­pends heav­ily on how much room for im­prove­ment the start­ing code leaves, and it should not be read as a real-world train­ing speedup. So the ab­solute mul­ti­ple is not the fig­ure to an­chor on here. What is more in­for­ma­tive is the like-for-like com­par­i­son that this ex­per­i­men­tal setup makes pos­si­ble, both across mod­els (~3x to ~52x over the past year) and against a skilled hu­man (~4x in four to eight hours on the same task).

As a check on judge bias, we ran the same test on a sep­a­rate set of 127 mo­ments where the hu­man’s next move was al­ready strong (as op­posed to the orig­i­nal set, where the hu­man’s di­rec­tion had room for im­prove­ment). There, the mod­els’ sug­ges­tions were judged bet­ter only about 20% of the time.

* Quotes from Anthropic em­ploy­ees through­out this ar­ti­cle are drawn from in­ter­nal dis­cus­sions and used with per­mis­sion. They re­flect in­di­vid­ual views as of May 2026, not of­fi­cial com­pany po­si­tions.

I re­cently got suck­ered into sub­scrib­ing to NYTimes be­cause I wanted to read an ar­ti­cle be­hind a pay­wall and I could­n’t find an easy and quick al­ter­na­tive. I did­n’t mind the $2.00 a month. But I took of­fense to what hap­pened af­ter I paid.

Over the course of the next 5 days, they sent me 5 on­board­ing mar­ket­ing emails and I could not opt out of any of them. What’s worse is their mes­sage in the footer.

You are re­ceiv­ing this one-time se­ries of on­board­ing mes­sages over a 14-day pe­riod be­cause they pro­vide es­sen­tial in­for­ma­tion about your new sub­scrip­tion. Because the mes­sages are about your re­la­tion­ship with The Times, you are re­ceiv­ing them re­gard­less of whether you are opted in to re­ceive mar­ket­ing emails from The New York Times.

You are re­ceiv­ing this one-time se­ries of on­board­ing mes­sages over a 14-day pe­riod be­cause they pro­vide es­sen­tial in­for­ma­tion about your new sub­scrip­tion. Because the mes­sages are about your re­la­tion­ship with The Times, you are re­ceiv­ing them re­gard­less of whether you are opted in to re­ceive mar­ket­ing emails from The New York Times.

They prob­a­bly think it’s a clever mar­ket­ing copy. It’s not. It made me feel pow­er­less. It put a sour taste in my mouth. It made them reek of des­per­a­tion. It made me go out of my way to check that my sub­scrip­tion does not auto-re­new. The irony is that had they in­cluded a sim­ple un­sub­scribe link or not sent me any­thing at all, I prob­a­bly would­n’t have both­ered to check.

Their copy makes it seem like they know they’re be­ing coy. And still they choose to not fol­low CAN-SPAM best prac­tices. And for what? A few more eye­balls and clicks. I’m aware me­dia and jour­nal­ism sites have been get­ting hit hard over the last few years, but is it this bad? It makes me won­der if NYTimes is unique in em­ploy­ing these tac­tics.

Email is near and dear to my heart. My own busi­ness uses email as a key growth chan­nel, so I un­der­stand its im­por­tance. But I make sure every mar­ket­ing email has an un­sub­scribe link at the bot­tom. Gmail users also see a one-click un­sub­scribe but­ton at the top. I also pro­vide a link which re­cip­i­ents can click to ini­ti­ate the off-board­ing flow in case they wish to per­ma­nently close their ac­count. I add this on some trans­ac­tional emails too.

I don’t con­sider these things to be anti-growth. On the con­trary, I con­sider them to be growth dri­vers. They help keep my email send­ing rep­u­ta­tion high and my email list clean. Customers feel like they’re in the dri­ver’s seat, which is ever more im­por­tant in to­day’s cli­mate and prob­a­bly helps my brand. Customers who wish to dis­con­tinue their re­la­tion­ship with my busi­ness can do so with­out fuss, so they’re less likely to bad­mouth me.

I earn a small frac­tion of what NYTimes earns. If I’m not des­per­ate, why are they?