Google Says AI Isn't Building Itself Yet—Even Though It Writes 75% of the Code

In brief

• Google DeepMind found no statistically significant acceleration in the pace of its AI progress after April 1, 2026; its capability index has climbed a steady 0.1 points a month.
• Most production code at the lab is now more than 75% AI-written, but about 88% of code changes still need humans to steer the AI or write code themselves.
• Gemini 4 Argon solved roughly half of the internal research engineering tasks it finished, far below the 90% score DeepMind treats as a red flag for full automation.

Google DeepMind went looking for proof that AI is speeding up the development of AI itself. It didn’t find any.

In the safety report for Gemini 4 Argon, its most powerful model, the lab concluded AI research isn’t moving any faster, even though AI now writes most of the code DeepMind’s engineers ship.

The finding cuts against the scenario that has spooked AI executives into calling for a slowdown. It’s called recursive self-improvement: an AI builds a smarter version of itself, which builds an even smarter one, until progress outruns anyone’s ability to test, regulate, or switch it off—what the report calls “a situation where existing guardrails are severely inadequate.”

“There is currently no significant end-to-end acceleration of ML R&D, AI-driven or otherwise,” Haydn Belfield, a Google DeepMind researcher who worked on the assessment, wrote in a thread on X. “We therefore conclude that the risk from AI-driven ML R&D is currently low.”