Is Anthropic on the cusp of RSI? Inside the redacted METR report | Luisa Rodriguez
80,000 Hours Podcast · Nov 12, 2026 · 15:11
80,000 Hours Podcast · Nov 12, 2026 · 15:11
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Anthropic’s AI is working to build the next version of itself. For the first time ever, an independent team got a chance to investigate this.
METR spent 11 weeks inside the lab, with access to data almost no one outside Anthropic has seen. They found its AI is improving twice as fast as last year. Largely due to AI doing the work.
To put that into perspective: in 2023 Claude couldn’t interpret images or search the web. This year, it helped crack a math problem that had stumped the best mathematicians for 87 years.
Now imagine another jump like that, but in months instead of years. AI companies could build models far more powerful than today’s, before anyone could understand or control them… and then use them to build more capable successors even faster.
Researchers call this recursive self-improvement. And it seems to be where we’re heading.
METR found nothing inside Anthropic that suggests this process is likely to slow down. In fact, it says the rate of speedup itself could be growing.
Anthropic redacted much of the report, so we may never see everything METR saw.
But in this video, Luisa Rodriguez explains what METR was allowed to share with the world, why many of the most respected experts are freaking out, and the strongest reasons METR might be wrong.
She also covers what needs to change, and what you can do to help.
This episode was recorded on November 9, 2026.
Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/METR-RSI
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