After telling the world, AI will kill you; now Anthropic wants companies to follow these three ‘metrics’ to know what AI models can do
As of August 2026, Anthropic said Claude was not fully autonomous for any measured AI R&D work. In the blog post, Anthropic said about 30,000 agents were carrying out research and engineering work at any one time on its most-used internal platform in August.
In a latest, the company has now laid out measurement tools for companies to highlight three critical aspects of AI development: “The extent to which AI is building the next version of itself, as opposed to being built by humans; Our ability to oversee and intervene in actions that AI agents take on Anthropic’s systems; The resources that power the development of more capable models”. “As the world considers pacing the frontier, we should do everything possible to minimize the gap between what frontier labs know and what the public knows,” Anthropic said in the blog post adding “This means better measuring the development of AI, reporting on it publicly, and giving society an opportunity to decide how to use this information. Anthropic said it has created an AI R&D Automation Index to measure how much of its AI research and development work is performed by Claude. At AL3, AI “collaborates” with humans. At AL4, AI “leads” the work and can complete most of a task from a high-level instruction. However, Claude was at the AL4 “leads” level for 26% of Anthropic’s AI R&D work, while more than 90% of the work was at AL3 or above. Anthropic said the share of work at or above the “AI collaborates” level had risen from below 1% in February 2026 to the current level for the measured work.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the pace of development of AI models to slow down last week. The first metric tracks AI-led AI research and development. The company uses a scale from AL0 to AL5. AL5 means the AI works fully autonomously without a human in the loop. The second metric looks at oversight of AI agents.