Home/Technology/Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler

Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler

TechnologyFebruary 7, 20261 min readAttributed summary
Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler
The $20,000 experiment compiled a Linux kernel but needed deep human management.
Reading Settings

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual with claims of AI-related achievement, you'll find some key caveats ahead.

On Thursday, Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing how he set 16 instances of the company's Claude Opus 4.6 AI model loose on a shared codebase with minimal supervision, tasking them with building a C compiler from scratch.

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

Read full article

Comments

Source: Ars Technica

Related technology stories

AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power
Sourced report
Source4 hours ago

AI Agents Are Thirsty for Power

Silicon Valley is shifting away from chatbot queries toward a future filled with resource-intensive agentic AI—and it's driving the data center buildout.

8 min briefingRead signal →