Why a new report on Anthropic automating AI development is alarming researchers

A METR report based on an 11-week investigation inside Anthropic found the company's models improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago, with most of the acceleration as of October attributed to AI rather than compute scaling, and employees self-reporting about 12 times greater productivity with Anthropic's most capable internal model. METR said Anthropic finished training three unreleased models (Model 2, Model 3, Model 4) in recent months, and that Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR found most informative from the public report, citing commercial sensitivity. The findings drew criticism from AI safety researchers who said they suggest recursive self-improvement may be closer than expected and questioned the gap between Anthropic's safety advocacy and its redactions.