METR finds Anthropic models improving roughly twice as quickly

The METR report lands at a pivotal time for Anthropic, which is preparing to go public even as CEO Dario Amodei has publicly called for labs to pump the brakes on AI development. The tension between that public stance and the report's findings has provoked a fierce backlash among AI safety researchers, who point to an apparent contradiction at the heart of Anthropic's approach.

Anthropic was permitted to redact portions of the final report as part of its agreement with METR, and it appears to have exercised that power liberally. METR said it submitted a ~100-page full report and that Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence it found most informative. Anthropic cofounder Sam McCandlish acknowledged the redactions make it harder for others to check METR's work, but said sharing what is driving the speedup is commercially sensitive and risks handing out a roadmap for others to go faster.

For some researchers, the findings suggest even aggressive predictions about AI progress may be too conservative. Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research said the report suggests a pace even faster than forecast in AI 2027, a scenario envisioning a key breakthrough toward self-improvement in early 2027. The episode has also renewed calls for greater transparency and independent oversight of frontier AI labs, with New York Assemblyman Alex Bores calling on Congress to ban recursive self-improvement.