Necva Tastan Sevinc
05 June 2026•Update: 05 June 2026
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic called for international coordination to allow a potential pause in the development of advanced AI systems, warning that society may struggle to keep pace with the technology’s rapid progress.
In a report published Thursday, the California-based company said: “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 company said it would support such a move only if other leading AI developers also joined in and compliance could be verified.
“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,” it said.
Anthropic argued that a meaningful pause would require “multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions,” while also ensuring that each participant could verify if others had genuinely halted development.
The company argued that AI systems are increasingly taking over tasks once performed by engineers and researchers.
“The evidence suggests that the human role is narrowing at each step in the AI development process,” the report said. It added that once AI-generated and human-written code reach the same quality, “humans will stop writing code entirely, and shift to only reviewing it.”
Anthropic warned that human oversight could eventually become the main constraint on AI progress if people cannot review code as quickly as AI systems generate it.
“Put simply: the doing (i.e., writing the code, running the experiment, producing the result) now costs almost nothing in human time,” the company said.
According to the report, more than 80% of the code merged into Anthropic’s production codebase is now written by its AI assistant Claude. The company also said its engineers produce eight times more code per quarter on average than they did between 2021 and 2025.
Anthropic said these trends could eventually lead to “recursive self-improvement,” where AI systems become capable of designing and developing their own successors.
While such systems could accelerate scientific and technological advances, the company warned that “full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems.”
“The window to investigate the questions together is here,” Anthropic said, urging policymakers, researchers, and civil society groups to take part in discussions over AI governance.
