Anthropic rapidly accelerating AI development amid slowdown calls, research group says
By Google News AI ·
SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic is developing its artificial intelligence systems around twice as quickly as it was a year ago amid the CEO's calls to slow down the technology's pace of improvement, according to an analysis released Thursday by an independent monitoring group.Anthropic invited researchers from the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit, Model Evaluation and Threat Research, to review its internal data and
interview staff as it prepares for its Wall Street debut with debate swirling over the potential for AI models to elude human control with catastrophic consequences.The findings are significant because details about the technology — and its risks — have been provided primarily by AI companies, which have been encouraged by President Donald Trump's administration to police themselves on matters of safety.It was during
the research group's assessment period that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the AI industry to slow its work so safety measures can catch up.
In a Sept. 12 essay responding to mounting concerns about runaway AI, he urged the AI world to "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models."Sam McCandlish, one of Anthropic's co-founders, responded to the report Thursday in a lengthy post on X, writing that many of METR's conclusions match his own.
"AI is speeding up our research, but it's hard to say exactly how much," he wrote.The San Francisco-based company is planning to go public later this month in what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever.METR estimated that Anthropic is improving the capabilities of its models to do "well specified tasks" around twice as fast as it was a year earlier.
The nonprofit's researchers said they believed much of the reason for the faster development is the help of AI itself.Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot increasingly is helping the company develop newer, more advanced versions of itself.METR has conducted evaluations on model capabilities for Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs for years.
The nonprofit is funded through donations and does not accept compensation for its work, but AI companies it has partnered with for evaluations have provided access and tokens, which METR uses for evaluations, research and engineering.One of its two reports was based on analysis of Anthropic's internal data provided by the company over a period of about 11 weeks, from mid-August through late October, as well as
employee interviews.METR said its assessment focused on a few k
Originally published by Google News AI
