Topic
The use of AI systems to perform research and engineering tasks that build further AI systems, and efforts to measure how much of that work is automated.
Anthropic has put a number on how much of its own AI research Claude now runs. The number comes out of a pipeline in which a Claude agent catalogued the tasks and a separate Claude judge scored them.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Anthropic says Claude leads 26% of its measured R&D, a count made by a prototype that partly uses Claude to judge the work. OpenAI's 3.1 agent workdays per human workday measures effort, and neither figure shows whether AI is speeding up AI research.
Reality
The lab says Claude leads 26% of its model research and collaborates on about 90%, with both tiers defined by how closely a human directs each task, and it wants rival labs publishing the same measure.
Perspective Coverage
6 publishersReality
METR's predeployment report on Claude Opus 5.5 names its five test tasks and the ten business days of API access behind them. It also states that the work was not meant to verify Anthropic's policy thresholds and did not assess alignment.
Reality
Anthropic says Claude leads 26 percent of its model research and development and takes part in more than 90 percent of it. The company wants rival labs to publish the same index so the numbers can be compared over time.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
METR also had the agent match the median human expert on five AI R&D tasks, using 32 hours of wall clock against the humans' eight, assembled from attempts of two hours or less. The confidence intervals still overlap the other public models it has tested.
Reality
The lab published a prototype index of how much of its own AI research Claude now leads, alongside a promise to embed outside evaluators with access comparable to what its internal risk teams get. The figures are dated August 2026.
Reality