AI's role in building AI surging? Anthropic says Claude now leads 26% of its R&D

Anthropic says Claude now leads 26% of its R&D work, up from 1% in March, as AI increasingly helps develop the next generation of AI. More than 90% of the company’s research involved human-AI collaboration in August, it said.

Anthropic's Claude is now leading 26% of the artificial intelligence research and development work at the company, up from less than 1% in February, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

It also said that more than 90% of Anthropic's AI R&D work is now performed at a level where AI either collaborates with humans or leads the work. The company added that Claude is not yet operating fully autonomously in any measured area of its R&D.

The information is part of a new set of metrics Anthropic plans to publish regularly to give the public, governments and outside researchers greater visibility into the pace of AI development inside frontier laboratories.

How Claude is taking over more AI R&D

Anthropic created a prototype called the Anthropic R&D Automation Index to measure how much of its AI research and development is being performed by Claude.

The index uses an automation scale developed by Epoch AI that ranges from AL0, where there is no AI involvement, to AL5, where AI operates fully autonomously without a human in the loop.

At AL3, AI collaborates with humans and can perform large portions of a task under close human direction. At AL4, or the "leads" level, AI can complete most of a task from a high-level prompt while a human supervises.

Anthropic said Claude has reached the AL4 "leads" level for 26% of its AI R&D work as of August.

The company built its measurement by examining internal work records, including Slack and other documentation.

AI is still not building AI on its own

Despite the rise in AI-led work, Anthropic stressed that it has not reached full autonomous AI development.

At AL5, an AI system would be able to identify a problem, determine what work needed to be done, develop and test a solution and deploy it without human involvement.

Prabhakar Jha