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METR: Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026
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. 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…
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. 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:
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