Anthropic AI R&D Speed Doubles, METR Assessment Finds
By Google News AI ·
Anthropic's artificial intelligence systems are now being built at roughly twice the speed they were a year ago, according to an independent assessment released Thursday, and much of that acceleration appears to be driven by AI helping to build more AI. The finding comes from METR, a nonprofit evaluator that conducted an approximately 11-week review of Anthropic's internal data, staff, and research process.
METR staff conducted the high-access evaluation at Anthropic from August 12 through October 29, examining whether the company's AI research and development had sped up and, if so, why, according to METR. Anthropic gave the group what it described as unprecedented access to internal data, including training metrics, benchmark scores, AI speedup analyses, forecasts, and staff interviews.
The organization estimated that Anthropic's model capabilities on well-specified tasks were improving at around twice the rate seen between March 2024 and October 2025, though it cautioned that the estimate carries substantial uncertainty.
On a narrower benchmark measure, the group put a sharper number on it: scores grew at an estimated 1.9 times the pre-October 2025 pace, with a 95 percent confidence range of 1.5 to 2.8 times. As reported by 10News, Anthropic's benchmark progress over the past year was roughly equal to its progress between October 2023 and October 2025, according to the METR report.
Business Insider adds that METR estimated Anthropic made roughly two years of historical progress over the last year alone.
The group said it was confident the speedup was not the result of faster growth in training compute, ruling out one of the most obvious explanations for a sudden leap in capability. Instead, METR judged that a majority of the acceleration was likely attributable to Anthropic's extensive use of AI to do its own R&D, while stressing that this conclusion remains uncertain.
METR researchers attributed much of the faster development to AI assistance rather than AI working entirely on its own, according to Business Insider, describing the dynamic as acceleration achieved primarily via AI assistance rather than fully autonomous contributions.
Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot increasingly helps develop newer and more advanced versions of itself, per 10News. Still, the same report notes that AI was not yet capable of making highly significant, fully autonomous contributions to the most important stages of model training, a limit confirmed by the Herald Sun's coverage of the assessment.
The 10News report adds that Anthropic researchers described significant signs that fully autonomous AI contributions to training could arrive soon, a detail attributed to the METR findings.
METR said it identified no bottlenecks, such as compute or data restrictions, that were holding back Anthropic's AI progress, and it warned that the absence of such limits raised the risk of even faster acceleration ahead. Business Insider reports METR flagged a significant risk that further capability progress could compound, while acknowledging it might be missing important bottlenecks of its own.
Separately, informal polls of Anthropic employees suggested productivity improvements of roughly 12 times, but the Herald Sun's reporting notes that METR explicitly cautioned those figures were unreliable and should not be read as a verified measurement.
METR also flagged a possibility that could cut the other way: its findings might overstate real-world impact if the…
Originally published by Google News AI
