Anthropic’s R&D Speed May Have Doubled Due to AI, Researchers Find

AI use within Anthropic may have doubled the company’s pace of AI development, a new report from AI research nonprofit METR says.

The rate that Anthropic’s models are improving as of this October is roughly twice the rate at which they improved between March 2024 and October 2025, according to the report. METR estimated that around 80% of the acceleration in Anthropic’s research pace is due to internal use of AI within Anthropic.

The report comes after CEO Dario Amodei committed to bring third-party researchers, including METR, into Anthropic as embedded evaluators with “employee-like access” to investigate adherence to safety practices. Although this particular report was separate from the embedded evaluation partnership, METR said it was given access to internal information for the report that “surpassed our expectations.”

METR said it found AI research could not yet be fully automated within Anthropic, but there were “signs of life” that it was possible for further R&D acceleration to take place from AI soon. That could eventually lead to a loop where AI continuously improves itself to become more and more capable, potentially leading to “extreme and risky capabilities,” the METR report said.

The report also analyses three unreleased models Anthropic has trained since July 2026. The most recent model cited in the report finished training in September or October, and largely continues the existing trend of improvement compared to previous models on a suite of tests Anthropic uses to measure AI capabilities.

Anthropic gave METR staff access to data on how models were trained, benchmark scores for unreleased models, and internal analyses for the report. METR staff also conducted interviews with around 15 Anthropic employees to form an R&D acceleration estimate.