Anthropic says Claude is now leading more than a quarter of its AI research

• Claude now leads 26% of Anthropic's AI R&D work, up from 1% in March.
• Anthropic said that humans still supervise Claude and that it is not fully autonomous.
• The company said metrics reporting could help monitor how close AI is to improving on its own.

Claude is taking on a growing share of the work behind Anthropic's next-generation AI.

Anthropic said in a Thursday blog post that Claude now "leads" 26% of its AI research and development work, meaning the chatbot can complete most of a task from a high-level prompt while a human supervises. The company said that the figure was below 1% in March.

"The share of work at or above 'AI collaborates' is above 90%," Anthropic said, adding that "Claude is not operating fully autonomously for any measured subset of AI R&D work."

The figures could help indicate how close the industry is to recursive self-improvement, which Anthropic described as "a model fully autonomously building its successor."

"Models accelerating their own development could make it more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems," Anthropic said. "It is therefore important to share these metrics to understand how close the world is to reaching recursive self improvement."

Anthropic's report comes amid an ongoing debate over AI safety and how quickly the models are improving. An Anthropic researcher resigned last week and accused leading AI companies of "gambling with our lives" by pushing ahead with increasingly capable models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has since called for frontier AI companies to coordinate on slowing development to give safety measures more time to catch up.

Anthropic said in its report that the company's AI actions are reviewed by automated monitors. Anthropic said 0.002% of more than 1 billion decisions analyzed in August, which amounts to about one in 47,000, were blocked. Roughly 50 high-priority cases are escalated for human review each week.

Anthropic said other frontier labs could publish the same figures and allow third parties to verify them.

"We are reporting these measurements because they give the public, third parties, and governments better visibility into the pace of AI development inside frontier labs," the company said. "This means better measuring the development of AI, reporting on it publicly, and giving society an opportunity to decide how to use this information."