Anthropic's AI Progress Doubled in a Year, Audit Finds
The Facts
- Anthropic is improving its AI models' capabilities on well-specified tasks roughly twice as fast as it was a year earlier, according to an assessment released Thursday by the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR).
- METR estimated that benchmark scores for Anthropic's models, tracked through an internal version of the Epoch Capabilities Index, had climbed 1.9 times faster since October 2025, meaning the company made about two years of historical progress over the past year.
- METR said it confidently ruled out faster growth in training compute as the cause and estimated that roughly 80% of the current acceleration stems from AI use, while identifying no clear bottlenecks on compute or data over the next 12 months.
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The Spin
Pro-industry narrative
Opening the books to an outside auditor on something this sensitive takes real nerve, and no rival lab has come close. Holding back the specifics that would hand competitors a shortcut is responsible, not evasive, as spreading the recipe for faster progress would multiply the very danger being measured. Independent, focused analysis inside the company beats guesswork from the outside every time.
Industry-critical narrative
An audit with blacked out evidence is essentially a press release with footnotes, and the public is left taking the company's word on the scariest question in tech. A company-monitored review also threatens credibility, as the reviewer's conclusions are at risk of being fired. For a company that brands itself on safety, this sure looks like Anthropic is trying to curate threat levels to keep regulation in-house.
