Sixteen Claude AI agents built a new C compiler

Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing an experiment that set 16 instances of the Claude Opus 4.6 model loose on a shared codebase with minimal supervision to build a C compiler from scratch. Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions that cost about $20,000 in API fees, the agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.

Carlini used a feature called “agent teams.” Each Claude instance ran inside its own Docker container, cloned a shared Git repository, claimed tasks by writing lock files, and pushed completed code back upstream. No single orchestration agent directed traffic; each instance independently picked what to work on next and resolved merge conflicts on its own.

The resulting compiler, released on GitHub, can compile a range of major open source projects, including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg, and QEMU.

claude opus, anthropic, nicholas carlini, c compiler, rust-based, agent teams, docker, github, linux 6.9, risc-v