[Linkpost] “METR: Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026” by Zach Stein-Perlman

This is a link post. Executive summary From August 12 to October 29, 2026, METR staff performed a high-access evaluation at Anthropic to assess the degree to which AI is accelerating AI R&D.[2] If AI systems started to significantly accelerate further AI development, this could lead to a sudden emergence of extreme and risky capabilities. Anthropic offered unprecedented access to internal data on their AI R&D process, including a variety of metrics on pretraining, reinforcement learning (RL), training compute in each domain, benchmark scores for internal models, AI speedup analyses, forecasts of a future model's metrics, and interviews with relevant staff. In our first section, we share our subjective conclusions about risk. We now believe that: As of October 2026, Anthropic is likely improving the capabilities of their models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate they did between March 2024 and October 2025. This estimate is given with high uncertainty; we would not be surprised if the true acceleration was closer to 1.3x or 3x the historical rate. A majority of this acceleration today is likely attributable to Anthropic's extensive use of AI to do R&D, though there is significant uncertainty and other causes likely played a [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N5AmYkRks5CqAxvBg/metr-independent-assessment-of-ai-r-and-d-acceleration-at Linkpost URL: https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-anthropic-ai-rd-acceleration-assessment/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .