METR finds Anthropic may have crossed its own AI acceleration warning threshold back in July

METR's audit of Anthropic, based on access to unreleased model benchmarks and internal data from August to October 2026, found that Anthropic's model test scores have been climbing about 1.9 times faster since October 2025 than in the prior period, with roughly 80 percent of the speedup attributed to AI being used in Anthropic's own research. METR says Anthropic's internal unredacted risk report implies an acceleration factor of 1.97, making it plausible the company's "less than a factor of 2" warning threshold was crossed on July 15, and notes Anthropic canceled the planned compute-allocation portion of the audit.