Ajeya: AI is dramatically accelerating AI research right now

Earlier this week, Anthropic stated in their S1 that they “may imminently meet” the threshold of “dramatically accelerated progress due to AI” as defined in their Responsible Scaling Policy. In their latest RSP (effective July 2026) , say this threshold will be met when: They observe or expect overall capabilities progress to be going twice as fast as the fastest sustained rate before AI was contributing much to AI R&D. This is plausibly attributable to AI automating AI R&D, rather than acceleration in compute or other inputs. For the last few months, some of my colleagues at METR have been working on a deep-access investigation to understand how much Anthropic is being accelerated by its AI systems. From my reading of their report and Anthropic’s RSP, it looks like the “dramatic acceleration” threshold has already been crossed. The report authors found that: Between October 2025 and October 2026, capabilities progress at Anthropic has been going about twice as fast as it had been over the previous twelve months. The measurement they report is an internal version of the Epoch Capabilities Index called AECI; a wide range of other supporting evidence for acceleration has been redacte