Outside Auditors Spent Eleven Weeks Inside Anthropic and Found Its AI Has Doubled the Speed at Which Anthropic Builds AI. The Company Blacked Out Most of the Evidence, and Its IPO Roadshow Starts Next Week
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METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, published on November 5 an independent assessment conducted inside Anthropic from August 12 to October 29. It found Anthropic's models are improving on benchmarks at about 1.9 times their historical rate since October 2025, roughly two years of progress in one, and judged that AI assistance is likely the majority cause, not more training compute. Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR found most informative from the roughly 100-page report; co-founder Sam McCandlish accepted that this makes METR's work harder to check but called it the right call. The report landed days before Anthropic's IPO roadshow and drew sharp criticism from AI safety researchers.
