AI is dramatically accelerating AI research right now

This post discusses a public METR report on AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic. I did not work on this project or see the unredacted report.1 All opinions are my own and do not represent METR or the report authors. Thanks to Ryan Greenblatt for discussion, feedback, and help with modeling, and Daniel Kokotajlo, Eli Lifland, and Hjalmar Wjik for comments. Earlier this week, Anthropic stated in their S1 that they “may imminently meet” the threshold of “dramatically accelerated progress due to AI” as defined in their Responsible Scaling Policy. In their latest RSP (effective July 2026), say this threshold will be met when: They observe or expect overall capabilities progress to be going twice as fast as the fastest sustained rate before AI was contributing much to AI R&D.2 They observe or expect overall capabilities progress to be going twice as fast as the fastest sustained rate before AI was contributing much to AI R&D.2 This is plausibly attributable to AI automating AI R&D, rather than acceleration in compute or other inputs.3 This is plausibly attributable to AI automating AI R&D, rather than acceleration in compute or other inputs.3 For the last few months, some of my colleagues at METR…