Anthropic publishes an R&D Automation Index: Claude 'leads' 26% of its own AI research work as of August 2026
The Anthropic Institute released a prototype index on 2026-09-17 that catalogues every kind of AI R&D task at the company and rates each on Epoch AI's Automation Level scale from AL0 to AL5. As of August 2026, Claude is at AL4 ('leads', completing most of a task end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision) for 26% of Anthropic's AI R&D work, more than 90% of the work sits at AL3 or above, and no measured subset is at AL5. Anthropic frames the publication as giving governments and third parties visibility into how close the field is to recursive self-improvement while the world 'considers slowing' the pace, which is why the r/ClaudeAI thread (333 upvotes) split between reading it as an RSI milestone and reading it as doom marketing.
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