Greg Casar calls for a ban on recursive self-improvement after METR finds AI accelerating AI development

Two words, posted at 7:25 p.m. on Thursday: “Ban RSI.” By the time most of Washington had gone home, Rep. Greg Casar’s post on X had passed 100,000 views — and by early Friday it was past 133,000, with nearly 800 replies. The target is recursive self-improvement: the idea that AI systems could start building their own successors, each generation faster than the last, until the loop runs beyond human control.

The timing is the story. Casar posted a day after METR, the independent AI evaluation group, published its assessment of Anthropic’s internal data. The headline finding: the lab’s AI development is running about twice as fast as it would without AI assistance — and, in METR’s words, there is no convincing bottleneck standing in the way of it going faster still.

What METR actually found#

METR spent about eleven weeks inside Anthropic, from August 12 to October 29, reviewing internal data on model performance, training compute and research efficiency, and interviewing the lab’s researchers. Its report, published November 5, is the first independent assessment of its kind — and its numbers are striking:

The caveats matter as much as the numbers. METR says Anthropic redacted much of the evidence it considered most informative, so the public cannot check the work behind the conclusions. Anthropic co-founder Sam McCandlish responded the same day, saying many of METR’s conclusions matched his own, while acknowledging that the redactions make independent verification harder. He also promised an Anthropic report on progress speed and its safety framework standing.

One number in the debate has already been corrected. METR researcher Ryan Greenblatt first framed the software-R&D multiplier as 4.5x, then revised it to about 3.8x — the figure now circulating in Reddit threads is the uncorrected one. The report’s own headline figure is the 1.9x overall acceleration, and that is the number to use.

What “Ban RSI” would actually mean#

Recursive self-improvement, as the post Casar quoted defines it, is AI companies fully automating AI research — letting AIs build the next AI. The post he quoted, by New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, argues the METR report is a warning that this process is already accelerating and that Congress must act before labs build what Bores calls “godlike AI on their own terms.” Bores also wrote that OpenAI says it is on track to fully automate AI research by March 2028 and that Anthropic employees say 2027 — his claims, not ones this publication has independently verified.

A ban on RSI is not the same as a ban on AI development. The distinction is the loop itself: ordinary AI assistance to human researchers is already everywhere, and METR found that is where most of today’s acceleration comes from. RSI, in the sense Casar and Bores use it, is the point where the loop closes — AI systems making the most important training contributions on their own. By METR’s own account, that point has not arrived: the report says AI has not yet made highly significant, fully autonomous contributions in the most critical parts of model training. So the thing Casar wants to ban is, on the evidence he is citing, a threshold the industry is approaching rather than one it has crossed.

That makes the practical questions hard. A ban would need a definition regulators could enforce: what counts as recursive self-improvement, how it is measured, and who decides when a lab has crossed the line. Casar’s post answers none of that — it is two words and a quote, not a bill. His September proposal with Senator Bernie Sanders, the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, would permanently prohibit superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced development until a federal regulator sets safety rules. The new post narrows the target: not AI development in general, but the self-improving loop specifically.

The reaction so far#

On Reddit’s r/accelerate, where the post was shared hours after it went up, the reception was hostile — the sub is accelerationist, and the top comments dismissed the call as an attempt to stop technology that does not exist yet. The thread itself was small, 37 upvotes and 36 comments, but the X post’s 133,000 views tell a different story about reach: the audience for this argument is well beyond one subreddit.

The split the post exposes is real. Safety advocates read METR’s report as the first independently examined evidence that the feedback loop is already operating. Accelerationists read the same report and see a congressman calling to ban something that, by METR’s own account, cannot yet do the most important work on its own. Both sides are, in a sense, reading the same document — and drawing opposite conclusions about how urgent it is.

What to watch#

First, whether other lawmakers pick up the RSI framing. Casar’s September bill gained Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna and eight other House Democrats; watch for sign-ons, or for a dedicated RSI proposal that tries to define the loop in enforceable terms. Second, Anthropic’s promised report on progress speed and safety-framework standing — if it lands, it will be the lab’s answer to METR’s numbers. Third, whether METR’s findings get independent corroboration: the redactions are the weak point, and without the underlying data the 1.9x figure rests on METR’s access and judgment. And the timelines Bores cited — March 2028 for OpenAI, 2027 for Anthropic — are his claims; watch whether the labs confirm, dispute, or ignore them.

Sources: Rep. Greg Casar on X, here; Alex Bores on X, here; METR on X, here; METR, “Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026,” here; the r/accelerate thread, here. Cover photo: official portrait of Rep. Greg Casar, 118th Congress, public domain, U.S. House of Representatives. Second photo: the U.S. Capitol dome at night, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Third image: AI-generated editorial illustration.