METR: AI roughly doubled Anthropic's research pace, but most evidence was redacted
AccBalanced · x · 2026-11-08
METR published its report on whether AI is accelerating AI development, based on August-October access to Anthropic internal data:
- METR estimates 80% of the speedup comes from AI itself (with substantial uncertainty), is confident it didn't come from faster compute growth, and found no clear bottlenecks for the next 12 months
- Informal Slack polls of Anthropic staff put the speedup at 12x, but in 15 interviews views centered around 2x
- Anthropic canceled the compute-verification part of METR's review midway
- Co-founder Sam McCandlish, in his first-ever tweet, said sharing what drives the speedup risks "handing out a roadmap for others to go faster"
Key tension: METR says AI roughly doubled Anthropic's progress, while Anthropic redacted most of the evidence.
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