METR reviews Anthropic automated R&D risk chapter
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METR released a review of the "Automated R&D Risk" chapter of Anthropic's August 2026 risk report, agreeing with the report's judgment that the catastrophic risk posed by the July 15 model is low, but believing that its early warning threshold may have already been crossed at the time. This review is part of a high-privilege AI R&D acceleration assessment: Anthropic provided METR with a private version of the risk report and a large amount of other non-public data, and has the right to redact non-public information in METR's published content.
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- METR BlogReview of the "Risks from automated R&D" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)
METR agrees with Anthropic that internally deployed models as of July 15th posed low risk of directly automating R&D or causing acute catastrophic risks, but argues the public report's claim that the 2x Acceleration Threshold was not crossed relies on contestable judgment calls and understates the acceleration observed. METR notes the private report's figures imply an acceleration of about 1.97x (described publicly as "less than a factor of 2"), that the private report calls it "plausible" that AI-attributable counterfactual acceleration exceeded 2x, and that AECI data cannot confidently distinguish a one-time jump from continued acceleration. METR concludes it is plausible the early warning threshold had been crossed by July 15th, while agreeing direct catastrophic risks at the time were low.
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