Anthropic says its Claude AI system is now playing a major role in the company’s own artificial intelligence research, with the model leading about 26% of its research and development work.
The numbers show a sharp rise from earlier this year, when less than 1% of Anthropic’s AI research work was led by Claude. The company published the figures as part of a new effort to track how quickly AI systems are becoming capable of doing the work involved in developing more advanced AI.
Anthropic said more than 90% of its AI research and development work now involves AI systems either working alongside researchers or taking the lead on tasks. However, the company said Claude is not yet fully autonomous in any area of its AI research.
Claude’s role has grown rapidly in Research Work
Anthropic measures AI involvement in research using a scale developed by Epoch AI. The scale ranges from no AI involvement to full autonomy. Under the system, an AI is considered to “lead” a task when it can complete most of the work from a high-level instruction, while a human remains responsible for supervision.
Claude reached this level for 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work in August. The change has been rapid. Anthropic said the share was below 1% in February. By August, Claude was therefore leading a much larger portion of the work involved in developing and improving AI systems.
Anthropic said more than 90% of its AI R&D work now involves AI at the level of collaboration or higher. This includes work where AI helps researchers complete tasks as well as work where the AI takes the lead. It cover a wide range of activities involved in AI development rather than showing that Claude is capable of independently creating a complete AI model.
AI is involved in more than 90% of AI research
The 26% figure represents work that Claude leads. The broader use of AI is much higher. Anthropic said more than 90% of its AI R&D work now falls into categories where AI either works with humans or leads the task. Human researchers still remain involved in the process, particularly in setting goals, reviewing results and making final decisions.
This means AI is being used across a growing part of the work required to develop new AI systems, including areas such as coding, experiments, evaluation and research.
Around 30,000 AI agents are working inside Anthropic
Anthropic also disclosed the number of AI agents operating on its internal systems. The company said about 30,000 AI agents were carrying out research and engineering work on its most widely used internal platform at any one time in August.
These agents are being used for tasks connected to research and engineering, allowing employees to delegate more work to AI systems. Anthropic said the agents are monitored through both real-time and after-the-fact systems. Every action taken by the agents on the platform passes through an online monitoring system before execution.
The company said it analysed more than 1 billion decisions made by its research and engineering agents in August. About 0.002% of those decisions were blocked, equal to roughly one in 47,000 decisions.
Anthropic also uses systems that review agent activity after actions have been taken. The company said these systems flag activities for additional review, with higher-priority cases sent to human reviewers.
AI is Helping Build The Next Generation of AI
The growing role of Claude in Anthropic’s own R&D is important because it shows AI being used to improve the same technology that it is based on. AI systems have already been widely used for coding, data analysis, testing and other technical tasks.
Anthropic’s latest figures show that these systems are now taking on larger parts of the research process inside a leading AI company. The company said measuring this trend is important because increasing automation could affect how quickly new AI systems are developed.
Anthropic’s R&D Automation Index is intended to track this change over time. The company said it plans to continue publishing measurements so that the public can get a clearer picture of how AI development is changing inside frontier labs.
However, Anthropic also pointed out that its measurements have limitations. The company is using Claude to help assess some of its own R&D activities, meaning the system being measured is also involved in measuring the work.
Anthropic said independent third-party evaluation could help address this issue and improve comparisons between different AI companies.
Topics
- Anthropic
- Claude
