X-Risk Daily

The majority of code at Anthropic is now written by Claude, with some employees ceasing to write code directly and instead focusing on oversight and validation of AI-generated output.

Clark, who heads the Anthropic Institute launched in March 2026, said he returned from paternity leave in February to discover colleagues had fundamentally reoriented their roles around managing AI systems and verifying their outputs rather than producing code themselves. The internal shift has led to an explosion in code volume, prompting greater investment in telemetry and observability infrastructure to monitor what Clark characterised as an emergent ecosystem of autonomous agents. In one experimental deployment focused on automated alignment research, a single human researcher effectively supervised a team of nine synthetic research agents working on AI safety problems.

The transformation has reshaped Anthropic's hiring priorities. Clark noted that the value of junior engineering talent is becoming "a bit more dubious" inside the company, while senior engineers with "really, really well-calibrated intuitions and taste" are increasingly valuable. The company now seeks early-career candidates with deep expertise in large language models and highly experienced professionals capable of conceptualising ambitious projects, rather than mid-level engineers focused on implementation. Clark predicted that AI could account for 99% of the company's coding by year-end "if things speed up really aggressively".

According to external research organisation METR, Claude Opus 4.6 can reliably complete tasks that would take a skilled human approximately 12 hours, representing a dramatic compression of capability timelines from earlier models. Anthropic reports the model "plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, can operate more reliably in larger codebases, and has better code review and debugging skills". The system features a one-million-token context window and introduced agent team functionality, allowing multiple Claude instances to coordinate on complex engineering tasks.

Clark framed the internal experiment as Anthropic deliberately stress-testing its own systems ahead of more capable models. In an interview with Axios, he placed the development in a broader trajectory, predicting a 60% or greater probability that an AI model will autonomously train its successor by the end of 2028. He characterised the shift as humans moving to a verification layer atop a vastly expanded virtual organisation of AI systems, with teams expected to shrink in headcount while tackling more ambitious technical objectives. Anthropic's research agenda warned of "AI contributing to speeding up the research and development of AI itself", a dynamic known as recursive self-improvement that has historically been confined to theoretical AI safety literature.

On 27 May, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the Democratic Republic of Congo faces a catastrophic collision between an Ebola outbreak and armed conflict, describing conditions in which insecurity and violence are making it "nearly impossible" to trace contacts and isolate cases. The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, was officially declared on 15 May 2026 in Ituri Province, with 121 confirmed cases and more than 1,000 suspected cases now reported across Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu provinces.

The crisis is compounded by the absence of approved vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo strain, which differs from the more common Zaire strain that dominated previous outbreaks. WHO emphasized that containment depends entirely on public health measures—contact tracing, ring vaccination protocols used for other strains, isolation, and safe burial practices—all of which require sustained humanitarian access. Yet ongoing fighting, attacks on health facilities, and restrictions imposed by armed groups have severely disrupted these interventions. Nearly 10 million people across the affected provinces are facing acute hunger between January and June 2026, with the WHO chief noting that populations weakened by malnutrition are far more vulnerable to infection.

The pattern echoes the 2018-2020 North Kivu outbreak, where conflict zones became disease reservoirs and more than 2,200 people died. This time, health workers report that mass displacement is pushing exposed contacts into overcrowded camps, severing containment corridors and creating new transmission clusters beyond surveillance reach. Ituri Province, the outbreak's epicenter, is a high-traffic mining area with 273,000 displaced people and proximity to Uganda and South Sudan, raising concerns about regional exportation. Cases have already been confirmed in Uganda's capital, Kampala, and the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 17 May.

Tedros appealed for an immediate ceasefire, stating that stopping transmission depends entirely on humanitarian access. The true scale of the outbreak remains uncertain due to access constraints, but the pattern is familiar: without a security environment permitting comprehensive public health intervention, the outbreak could spiral beyond local containment capacity, potentially threatening regional stability and testing international biosecurity infrastructure in a region where state services have been largely absent for decades.

Iran restored limited internet connectivity on 27 May after an 88-day near-total blackout, which NetBlocks described as the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history. Rather than celebration, the first reactions from Iranian users expressed scepticism, anxiety, and anger as delayed messages and content flooded back online. According to CNN, many Iranians reacted with sarcasm, with one woman posting on X that the regime wants to bring back the heavily filtered "filternet" while making a spectacle of restoring basic connectivity.

The blackout began on 8 January 2026 during mass anti-government protests driven by surging inflation and economic crisis, according to multiple monitoring groups. Restrictions were briefly eased in late January before authorities reimposed a near-total shutdown on 28 February following US and Israeli military strikes. The restoration came after President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the Ministry of Communications to restore international internet access, a directive approved by the Special Headquarters for Organizing and Governing the Country's Cyberspace. However, The National reported that residents experienced uneven speeds and ongoing filtering, with many still requiring VPNs to access blocked platforms.

The economic toll of the shutdown proved severe. According to the Boston Globe, the blackout cost an estimated $30-40 million daily in direct losses, with indirect costs likely twice that amount. Iran's Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi previously acknowledged that approximately 10 million jobs depend on internet connectivity. UPI reported that thousands lost their jobs during the shutdown, while online sales fell by 80 percent.

The extended blackout represents an extreme form of information control by Iran's clerical regime, which has repeatedly used internet shutdowns to suppress dissent during periods of political unrest. The country's internet governance is highly centralised, controlled by the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, a body established in 2012 whose members include senior political, judicial, intelligence, and religious figures, according to CNN. During the blackout, authorities created a two-tier system through programmes like "Internet Pro," which allowed privileged access to some businesses and professionals for a fee, drawing widespread criticism for creating what observers described as a digital class divide. The psychological impact of the blackout — reflected in the anxious rather than relieved response to restoration — indicates successful intimidation of the population, though the regime's willingness to lift restrictions suggests either that the immediate crisis has passed or that economic and diplomatic costs had become unsustainable.

On 26 May, the Office of Personnel Management posted a draft rule to the Federal Register proposing government-wide non-disclosure agreements for all federal employees, both new hires and existing staff. The move marks an unprecedented expansion of secrecy requirements across the roughly 2 million-strong federal workforce, where such agreements have historically been confined to classified or national security positions.

The proposed NDAs would cover information relating to internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, and any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material not currently publicly available, according to CNN. The administration justified the measure by citing recent leaks about immigration enforcement operations and the secretive January raid on Venezuela that captured former President Nicolás Maduro, which officials claim endangered the lives of federal agents and military personnel. The draft agreement would allow the government to pursue civil and criminal penalties against employees who disclose covered information, and grants the administration rights to royalties received from such disclosures—a provision whose practical application remains unclear. Former employees would require written permission from authorized agency officials to speak publicly about confidential information even after leaving government service, with the agreement remaining effective for five years post-employment.

While the draft explicitly preserves rights to make disclosures authorized by law, including under the Whistleblower Protection Act, civil liberties advocates and federal unions have raised constitutional concerns. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, characterized the proposal as an attempt to purge nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists unwilling to report waste, fraud, and abuse. Ray Limon, who served as a federal government attorney and human resources leader for nearly three decades, told NPR that such broad language could discourage lawful whistleblower disclosures despite the stated protections. Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation described the policy as "dangerously secretive," warning it would undermine transparency mechanisms that have historically exposed government wrongdoing.

The proposal, which enters a 30-day public comment period following its Federal Register publication, would permit individual agencies to decide whether to implement the agreements. A separate draft rule proposed in 2025 suggested that refusal to sign could result in termination or debarment from future federal employment. OPM Director Scott Kupor defended the measure by comparing it to private-sector confidentiality agreements, stating that the federal government should not be held to a lower standard in protecting sensitive information. The initiative forms part of the Trump administration's broader campaign to control information flows from federal agencies, following earlier moves including NDAs imposed at the Pentagon in October 2025 and restrictions on press access to military facilities.