Anthropic's R&D Automation Index

Anthropic published internal numbers on how much of its own AI research its models now carry. As of August 2026, Claude is rated as leading roughly a quarter of that work (26%), and more than nine tenths of it sits at or above the level the index calls collaboration. The baseline was under one percent in February of the same year.

The method matters more than the headline. Tasks are rated against an automation scale developed by Epoch AI, then weighted by how much person-time they represent. The scale is third-party. The judging is not: Anthropic’s own models do the rating, and the publication says so directly, including the admission that the judge model could make the same class of error as the model it is grading.

The rest is oversight arithmetic. Roughly thirty thousand agents run concurrently, over a billion of their decisions were analysed across August, and two thousandths of one percent were blocked in real time. About a hundred thousand transcripts are flagged for offline review each week, of which roughly fifty reach a human. Safety is given about six percent of AI R&D compute, and about twelve percent of the compute for AI-driven AI R&D, on estimates the publication calls deliberately conservative.