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METR came out with an extensive report on how much AI is accelerating AI R&D at Anthropic, and thus how close we might be to recursive self-improvement (RSI) and how far that might go.
This is one of the most important questions in the world.
Their answer: Things are already accelerating on the order of a 2x speedup.
This is several months ahead of the AI 2027 timeline. A naive extrapolation says we may be less than a year away from full RSI. There are no clear bottlenecks in the way.
This report updated many towards shorter timelines.
This is consistent with what OpenAI and Anthropic themselves have been saying, and with extrapolation from the progress we are observing. We are running out of time.
That doesn’t have to be the way this plays out. We could stop the labs. The labs could choose to stop. Or the estimates could be wrong, or some bottlenecks could be hit, or the results could be less impactful than we expect. Indeed do many things come to pass. And if it does happen this quickly, one would expect it to go quite poorly, and likely to cause everyone to die, but perhaps it goes well.
It doesn’t look good.
The central conclusions are:
• Capabilities are advancing at roughly twice the rate they did from March 2024 to October 2025 (CI ~1.3x-3x), with wide uncertainty. And that a majority of that acceleration is probably due to AI doing AI R&D. Since October 2025, Anthropic has made ~2x progress on the ECI versus periods prior to October 2025.
• Yes, this seems like what has been obviously happening.
• There are no observed bottlenecks or strong diminishing returns that would prevent advancement from accelerating further.
• Unfortunately, Anthropic redacted the analysis of various bottlenecks.
METR: These conclusions are based on key empirical findings from the full report.
Some of the key findings that most informed our conclusions about risk were redacted.
Ajeya Cotra (METR): For the last few months, some of my colleagues at METR have been work