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  "url": "https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-rd-section-anthropic-risk-report-august-2026-review/",
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{"ok":true,"url":"https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-rd-section-anthropic-risk-report-august-2026-review/","text":"Review of the \"Risks from automated R&D\" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026) - METR\nOur Work\nResearch\nNotes\nUpdates\nRisk Assessment\nAbout\nDonate\nCareers\nSearch\n-->\nOur Work\nResearch\nNotes\nUpdates\nRisk Assessment\nAbout\nDonate\nCareers\nMenu\n×\nReview of the \"Risks from automated R&D\" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)\nDATE\nNovember 5, 2026\nSHARE\nCopy Link\nCitation\nBibTeX Citation\n×\n@misc { metr-2026-rd-section-anthropic-risk-report-august-2026-review ,\ntitle = {Review of the \"Risks from automated R&D\" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)} ,\nauthor = {METR} ,\nhowpublished = {\\url{https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-rd-section-anthropic-risk-report-august-2026-review/}} ,\nyear = {2026} ,\nmonth = {11} ,\n}\nCopy\nSubscribe\nRedaction summary: As part of this assessment, Anthropic had rights to redact any non-public information in this post. Per our approach to transparency , we had the right to disclose if Anthropic exercised redaction rights, and whether or not any of our findings depended significantly on redacted information. All redactions that were important to our conclusions are described in the report below.\nExecutive summary\nWe agree with Anthropic that catastrophic risks from July 15th models were low, but we think it is plausible that they had crossed their early warning threshold at the time.\nMETR reviewed the “Risks from automated R&D” section of Anthropic’s public August 2026 Risk Report . 1 We conducted this review as part of a high-access assessment of AI R&D acceleration, in which Anthropic shared a private version of the Risk Report along with extensive other non-public data. Alongside this review, we are publishing a holistic assessment of AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic . This was conducted by the same METR employees as this Risk Report Review.\nOverall, we agree with Anthropic that by July 15th, internally deployed models posed low risk of directly automating R&D in key domains or causing acute catastrophic risks from acceleration of capabilities progress. However, the report’s claim that they had not crossed their early warning thresholds relies on contestable judgment calls that aren’t communicated clearly in the public report. While both METR’s researchers on this project and Anthropic’s relevant staff lean toward it not having been crossed, we think it is plausible that it had been, and we believe the public report overall understates the level of acceleration that was occurring.\nIn this review we first summarize our understanding of Anthropic’s Risk Report , including their threat model, early warning threshold and key claims. We then describe our assessment of these key claims and conclusions. Finally, we share details about the process of this Risk Report Review (further details about the process and access can be found in our holistic review ).\nSummary of Anthropic’s Risk Report\nAnthropic’s RSP sets two capability thresholds for “Automated R&D in key domains.”\nUnder Anthropic’s RSP v3.4, the Automated R&D threshold is triggered by either of two conditions:\nFull Substitution Threshold: If they develop a model that can “fully substitute for our entire set of Research Scientists and Research Engineers, at competitive costs (i.e., within a factor of 5).”\n2x Acceleration Threshold: If there is “dramatic acceleration” of the pace of AI progress for reasons that likely relate to the automation of AI R&D. 2 This is defined in further detail in the RSP, but the details are not critical to our critique.\n(Note that although we give these thresholds names for clarity through the rest of this report, they do not have names in the RSP.)\nThe Risk Report argues the Full Substitution Threshold has not been crossed because models are not currently substituting for humans.\nThe Risk Report argues that models do not currently substitute for all of Anthropic’s staff because, despite the fact that Anthropic is highly incentivized to substitute models for research staff as much as possible, research staff still complete work at Anthropic.\n“[W]e believe it would be clear to us if models were capable of substituting, even at high cost, for the technical work of our entire research staff, and the fact that we do not perform such substitution even when strongly incentivized to is evidence against our models having this level of capability.”\nSimply put, Anthropic tries hard to substitute researchers out for models, but researchers are still required. They also present benchmark evidence, but we interpret it as less important and more uncertain than this direct observation.\nThe Risk Report argues the 2x Acceleration Threshold has not been crossed as capability metrics and leading indicators show less than a 2x acceleration, with factors other than AI driving that acceleration.\nThe Risk Report describes three primary lines of evidence that they are not crossing the 2x Acceleration Threshold:\nLimited acceleration in leading indicators: “Our leading indicators point to a picture of meaningful acceleration starting in early-to-mid 2025, though by less than a factor of 2”\nLimited attribution of this acceleration to AI: “We are fairly confident in attributing the acceleration in 2025 to factors other than our use of AI models, though we also believe that our AI models have been a key factor in the faster trends continuing through the coverage date.”\nWeak evidence against a sustained acceleration in AECI: Anthropic reports seeing weak evidence of a one-time jump in AECI attributable to non-AI progress rather than continued acceleration.\nThe Risk Report describes the 2x Acceleration Threshold as an early warning rather than direct evidence of high risk.\nThe August Risk Report describes the 2x Acceleration Threshold as follows:\n“The risk threshold set out in our RSP—a doubling of the pace of progress beyond pre-AI-acceleration rates, attributable to automation of AI R&D—functions as a potential early warning, rather than evidence that the threat has already materialized.”\nThey do not share a precise threshold that would indicate risk was high, but their threat model describes illustrative scenarios:\n“The threat: We believe that AI models could, in the next few years, have a broad range of capabilities that exceed human capabilities. In particular, most or all of the work needed to advance research and development in key domains—from robotics to energy to cyberwarfare to AI R&D itself—may become automatable.\nIf this is correct, there could be enormous benefits, but these benefits would come with several distinct but related concerns:\nSufficiently rapid progress in some areas of technology could change power structures both within and between nations. For example, if an authoritarian regime built a self-reinforcing lead in AI over the rest of the world, this lead could compound into a major advantage in science and technology—which could in turn translate to very sudden and disruptive advances in the ability to wage war, surveil citizens, and/or wield extremely powerful technology over the long term.\nIf AI models develop dangerous goals while heavily automating R&D in key domains, they may cause unbounded harm—up to and including humanity losing control over civilization entirely—by leveraging novel technology and their access to it.\nIf AI can be used to automate AI R&D itself, the result may be extreme acceleration in AI progress, putting a very broad set of risks on the table, including but not limited to those discussed in this report.”\nBased on these descriptions and conversations with Anthropic staff, we understand the overall risk designation of “low/medium/high” as being about the risk that models at the time directly enable the kinds of catastrophic concerns described above, not the risk that they cross their RSP threshold (though we believe this could have been made clearer in the report).\nAnthropic concludes the risk from this threat model on July 15th was “low.”\nThus, Anthropic concludes risk is “low” overall, si","chars":8000,"total_chars":22970,"offset":0,"truncated":true,"next_offset":8000}