Top AI lab researchers warned about automated AI research, and several of their predicted milestones have already fallen

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Aug 13, 2026

Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER

IAPS fellow Severin Field interviewed 25 researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Deepmind, Meta, and US universities about recursive self-improvement. In a new blog post, he takes stock. Several of the milestones those researchers named have already been hit.

In his post for the newsletter The Attack Surface, Field sums up his interview study from late summer 2025. Twenty of the 25 respondents rated the automation of AI research as one of the most severe and urgent AI risks. By recursive self-improvement (RSI), Field means a system skilled enough at AI development to build a stronger version of itself, which can then do the same. RSI can no longer be dismissed as marketing hype, he writes.