Sixteen Claude AI Agents Working Together Created a New C Compiler

Summary

Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post on February 6, 2026 describing an experiment in which 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 worked autonomously on a shared codebase to build a C compiler from scratch. Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing approximately $20,000 in API fees, the agent team produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures. Each Claude instance ran inside it