2:02 PM ET · Nov 5

METR finds AI is roughly doubling Anthropic's pace of AI R&D

AI safety nonprofit METR published an independent, high-access assessment of Anthropic (conducted Aug 12–Oct 29) concluding the company is likely improving model capabilities on well-specified tasks about twice as fast as it did from March 2024 to October 2025; benchmark scores have grown ~1.9x faster since October 2025 (95% CI 1.5–2.8x). METR estimates AI use drives perhaps ~80% of the acceleration, ruled out faster training-compute scaling as the cause, and found no convincing evidence of bottlenecks over the next 12 months. Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR considered most informative from the public version.

Source: METR

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Since August, a team within METR has worked with internal Anthropic information to assess whether AI itself is accelerating AI development. We are now publishing a report summarizing the results of this risk assessment.
— METR (@METR_Evals) Nov 5, 2026

METR says Anthropic has probably hit the 2x Responsible Scaling Policy acceleration threshold, and may now be running as high as 3x! 'We guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.'
— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) Nov 5, 2026

METR estimates that Anthropic is currently making progress in the capabilities of its models about twice as fast as it used to, and that the use of AI itself is driving a large part of this acceleration.
— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) Nov 5, 2026

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METR finds AI is roughly doubling Anthropic's pace of AI R&D

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