AI R&D Acceleration

The degree to which AI systems speed up the research and development of further AI systems. The evaluator METR states the concern directly: "If AI systems started to significantly accelerate further AI development, this could lead to a sudden emergence of extreme and risky capabilities." Anthropic lists AI R&D acceleration as a key risk indicator in its Responsible Scaling Policy. In a high-access assessment published in November 2026, METR concluded that Anthropic was "likely improving the capabilities of their models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate they did between March 2024 and October 2025", with a majority of that "likely attributable to Anthropic’s extensive use of AI to do R&D". It gave the estimate with high uncertainty. For businesses, faster acceleration means the capabilities of the AI tools they buy may change faster than their procurement and governance cycles assume.