AI is dramatically accelerating AI research

This post discusses a public METR report on AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic, which found that between October 2025 and October 2026 capabilities progress at Anthropic went about twice as fast as over the previous twelve months, with AI automation probably the large majority of the reason. The author argues the "dramatically accelerated progress due to AI" threshold in Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy has likely already been crossed, and that if AI roughly doubles capabilities progress overall it must be speeding up human researchers by much more—perhaps ~10x. He calls the report the most important update on AI risk in the last couple of years, while noting that most of the key evidence was redacted.