Why a new report on Anthropic automating AI development is alarming researchers

Source: The Verge · Robert Hart · 2026-11-07

Anthropic is using AI to build more powerful AI. And it appears to be working remarkably well, with the company’s models improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago, with little indication of slowing down.

That’s according to a new report published Thursday by the AI safety research organization METR, following an 11-week investigation inside the company. The findings offer some of the clearest evidence yet of AI accelerating its own development. They also come as Anthropic prepares to go public even as CEO Dario Amodei has called for labs to pump the brakes.

Anthropic was permitted to redact portions of the final report; METR wrote that for the public version Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence researchers found most informative.

Acceleration

METR said Anthropic’s models are improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago — “roughly two years of historical progress over the last year.” Researchers are confident this was not simply compute scaling. The majority of the acceleration as of October “is due to AI.” Employees using the most capable internal model self-reported being around 12× as productive as without AI assistance, about double what staff reported months earlier on Mythos 5.

Much of the acceleration appears assistive rather than fully autonomous, though METR warned of signs that fully autonomous contributions will play a larger role soon, with no clear diminishing returns.

Unreleased models

Over the past six months Anthropic finished training three unreleased models (codenamed Model 2, 3, and 4). METR also identified an unreleased 2022 model.

Redactions and reaction

Sam McCandlish acknowledged heavy redactions but argued sharing what drives the speedup is commercially sensitive and could hand rivals a roadmap. Critics accused Anthropic of accelerating the technology it warns is dangerous. New York Assemblyman Alex Bores called on Congress to “ban RSI, this year if possible.”