Anthropic put out something that should stop you for a second. They built an internal scorecard, calling it the R&D Automation Index, and it says Claude now leads about a quarter of the actual work that goes into building the next Claude.

Not helping with it. Leading it. That means Claude gets a high level prompt, works the problem mostly on its own, and a human checks the result at the end instead of babysitting every step along the way. Back in February that number was basically zero. By August it had climbed to 26 percent.

On top of that, more than 9 out of 10 research tasks at the company now involve Claude doing large chunks of work under close human direction. So the model that writes the model is doing more and more of the work of writing the next model.

Here is the part I keep chewing on. This comes from the same company whose CEO has spent the last few weeks publicly asking the whole industry to slow down. Dario Amodei is out here saying the R&D loop needs a speed limit, while his own numbers show that loop just found a faster engine. He is not hiding that tension either. He actually asked other labs to publish their own version of this index, so everyone is looking at the same speedometer instead of guessing.

That does not feel like a contradiction to me. It feels like someone showing their work instead of just repeating a warning. If you are worried about how fast this stuff moves, the first step is measuring how fast it actually moves inside your own walls, in public, where people can push back on the number.

Whatever side of the slow down conversation you land on, a real number beats a vibe every time. That is worth applauding quietly, while we all wait to see if anyone else follows.

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Sources:
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/measuring-pace-of-ai-development
https://www.engadget.com/2261909/anthropic-says-claude-leads-26-percent-of-its-ai-research-and-development/
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2026/09/17/anthropic-says-claude-is-taking-over-the-work-of-building-its-own-successor/91817226007/

Repost this. Thanks.