AI speeds up 3rd party safety researchers by ~1.6x (via self-reports)

TL;DR: Labs are accelerating due to automated AI research and development. As an upper bound, in March 2026, Anthropic researchers self-reported producing 4x more output with AI tools than without them. We lack public evidence on how this may differentially impact safety versus capabilities. As a first measurement of automated safety-specific research uplift, we surveyed 52 third-party AI safety professionals from 20+ orgs and found a median reported speedup of 1.58x. We think it is important to develop standardized methods for tracking safety-specific uplift, as these will facilitate a better understanding of the differential impacts of RSI. *This work was done by Arcadia Impact’s alignment team.* – AI R&D may not accelerate safety and capabilities equally Frontier AI companies are currently automating their AI R&D efforts. OpenAI claims that they are “making strong progress towards creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028.” At Anthropic, Claude now leads 26% of AI R&D , researchers self-report producing 4x more output , and code commits arrive 5x faster per engineer than 6 months ago . As labs push towards RSI, it is important to understand whether AI research uplifts