Anthropic says claude leads 26% of its ai research work, up from 1% in march, and collaborates on…
anthropic says claude leads 26% of its ai research work, up from 1% in march, and collaborates on over 90%. the lab's own roadmap now runs through its model.
the next question is who reviews the reviewer.
Context
Anthropic's post on measuring the pace of AI development describes a prototype Anthropic R&D Automation Index that catalogues every kind of AI R&D work at the company, rates how automated each task is on Epoch AI's scale (AL0 no AI involvement to AL5 fully autonomous, AL3 collaborates, AL4 leads) and aggregates the ratings. As of August 2026 it says Claude is not fully autonomous in any measured subset, leads 26% of Anthropic's AI R&D work, and the share at or above collaborates is above 90%. It also says about 30,000 agents were running at any time on its most-used internal platform in August and that every action passes through an online monitor.
This is an internal, self-reported index, not independently audited; the scale is Epoch's but the ratings are Anthropic's. The baseline month is unresolved: the chart alt text on Anthropic's page says under 1% in February 2026, while Reuters, dated 17 September 2026, says 1% in March. How work is counted, by tasks, time or value, is in an appendix that was not inspected, so the basis of 26% of its work is unverified. Reuters adds about one in 47,000 of more than a billion decisions blocked, secondary.
Related work
Watch next
- Later editions of the index and Epoch AI commentary.
Sources
- Measuring the pace of AI development (Anthropic)anthropic.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 06:48 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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