Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026

jackschultz

> The acceleration in late 2025 was likely influenced by non-AI factors. We investigated a variety of factors which could have contributed to the observed acceleration in late 2025, but details of many of these factors have been redacted. Of note, "the acceleration in late 2025" believe has to do with Opus 4.5 which in my view and from Metr's analysis[0], was the point where their tests stopped working because the model was so good that doing work without using it took much more time. > We guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.... We believe AI’s contribution has grown relatively more important over time, and do not think the other factors we investigated would explain the sustained acceleration. The evidence of speedup from the usage of AI we describe below also seems compatible with a large contribution. In a mini bet, I'd say that Anthropic is going to win by a large margin in what's going on. I've used the other models and no matter what the benchmarks are, places like OpenAI, Gemini, or the Deepseek / Kimi models haven't come close to the ability of the Claude models and harness. If what they say in this post is right, with "We did not identify any convincing bottlenecks to continued rapid progress.", this could be a sort of game over for the other models. Even with Opus 5.5 in the past month and a half has been a changer in its abilities. In my dev process, I can give it much more freedom and trust with the workflows and connections I have to do the valid work to where I can do more, bigger tasks at once. I can't tell you how curious I am with the Opus 5.6 and whatever Model 4 is going to be called (along with the cost!) will do for dev work. And if this keeps increasing, and if there are subtle tricks that Anthropic has that the other companies don't, what that means for finding solutions and overall value and if the others are ever going to be able to catch up in any way. All speculation, but what a time to be a dev in these times and get the first hand experience of all of this! [0] https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adopti...

m_w_

Although unsurprising given that there’s perhaps a trillion dollars at stake, it is disappointing that this article opens with “Anthropic’s redacted the best parts”. The table of shared/redacted sources is unfortunately dominated by no/partly.

reducesuffering

The most damning report indicating the severe trajectory towards RSI and ASI at frontier labs, the soon to be most impactful event in the world, and it’s barely a whisper on HN. Typical

sakompella

> As of October 2026, Anthropic is likely improving the capabilities of their models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate they did between March 2024 and October 2025. This estimate is given with high uncertainty; we would not be surprised if the true acceleration was closer to 1.3x or 3x the historical rate. > A majority of this acceleration today is likely attributable to Anthropic’s extensive use of AI to do R&D, though there is significant uncertainty and other causes likely played a large role in acceleration in late 2025. > The lack of observed bottlenecks or strong diminishing returns means there is a significant risk that further capabilities progress could lead to even faster acceleration, though, as we say below, we may be missing important bottlenecks. Cool to hear it's over for student before it ever started