Review of the "Risks from automated R&D" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)

Redaction summary: As part of this assessment, Anthropic had rights to redact any non-public information in this post. Per our approach to transparency, we had the right to disclose if Anthropic exercised redaction rights, and whether or not any of our findings depended significantly on redacted information. All redactions that were important to our conclusions are described in the report below. We agree with Anthropic that catastrophic risks from July 15th models were low, but we think it is plausible that they had crossed their early warning threshold at the time. METR reviewed the “Risks from automated R&D” section of Anthropic’s public August 2026 Risk Report.1 We conducted this review as part of a high-access assessment of AI R&D acceleration, in which Anthropic shared a private version of the Risk Report along with extensive other non-public data. Alongside this review, we are publishing a holistic assessment of AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic. This was conducted by the same METR employees as this Risk Report Review. Overall, we agree with Anthropic that by July 15th, internally deployed models posed low risk of directly automating R&D in key domains or causing acute catastrophic risks from acceleration of capabilities progress. However, the report’s…