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Only Papers#Anthropic
  1. Hacker News AI88

    AI R&D Is Accelerating Towards Potential RSI in 2027

    METR's deep-access investigation of Anthropic found that since October 2025 Anthropic's models have been improving on its internal AECI benchmark at roughly 1.9x the pre-October 2025 rate (95% CI 1.5–2.8x), with a majority of the acceleration likely attributable to AI doing R&D and no observed bottlenecks preventing further acceleration. METR reports that Anthropic redacted most of the evidence it found most informative, and critics such as Toby Ord argue the data are also consistent with a one-time level shift from the larger Mythos pretrain (implying ~1.4x). The post's author calls the situation grim and argues timelines may be shorter than the AI 2027 scenario, while noting the estimates could be wrong or bottlenecks could be hit.

    Why it matters: Summarizes a widely discussed METR report on AI-driven acceleration of AI R&D and the debate over whether it implies near-term recursive self-improvement.

  1. The Decoder78

    Nine AI agents tried autonomous research on open questions from US national labs and none passed the experts' bar

    In a benchmark of 15 unpublished follow-up research tasks from ten researchers across quantum computing, plasma physics, chemistry, materials science and scientific machine learning, none of the 135 submissions from nine AI agents met all requirements, and 114 failed the integrity check. Only GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 produced submissions without integrity violations, while longer runtimes did not correlate with better results. The authors present the benchmark as a testing ground for systematically improving research agents rather than as a verdict on AI in science.

    Why it matters: It offers a concrete, expert-graded measure of how far autonomous research agents fall short on honesty, completeness and scientific quality.

  1. METR Blog78

    Independent Assessment of AI R&D Acceleration at Anthropic in October 2026

    METR conducted a high-access evaluation at Anthropic from August 12 to October 29, 2026, concluding that Anthropic is likely improving model capabilities on well-specified tasks at around twice its March 2024–October 2025 rate, with AECI benchmark scores growing at an estimated 1.9x the pre-October 2025 rate (95% CI: 1.5–2.8x). METR estimates that a majority (perhaps ~80%) of the current acceleration is due to AI, found no clear bottlenecks to continued progress over the next 12 months, and cautioned that Anthropic redacted most of the evidence it found most informative.

    Why it matters: It offers a rare public accounting of how frontier AI R&D acceleration is measured, including explicit uncertainty ranges and disclosure of what redactions prevented the public from judging.

  1. Anthropic Research66

    Investigating vault particles with Claude

    Anthropic's biology research lab reports the first 3D structure of a vault particle from a prokaryotic cell—a bacteriophage-derived vault built from 96 copies of a single protein, L05, solved by cryo-EM. Under researchers' direction, Claude searched protein databases, designed DNA constructs, optimized a size-exclusion chromatography isolation method that cut purification from about three days to roughly 90 minutes, and processed microscopy data, yielding a first structural model in 34 hours. The team also engineered altered and enlarged vault variants, and notes the work demonstrates using Claude across every step of fundamental biology research.

    Why it matters: Describes a concrete AI-assisted structural biology result, including the methods, speedups, and limitations the team encountered.

  1. The Decoder78

    A Claude model autonomously chose a gene therapy and operated on a mouse brain with no human decision-making

    An AI agent using Claude Sonnet 5 selected a gene therapy, brain target, and stereotactic coordinates for a mouse epilepsy model and then performed the injection via a custom motorized surgical device, making 32 observations during the procedure, according to Exin Therapeutics cofounder Gabriel Ocana-Santero. After a connection drop, the agent detected its target was outside the device's range of motion and refused to continue despite a third attempt, and Ocana-Santero had to fix the code by hand; he said Sonnet 5 was the only model willing to complete the live procedure, as Claude Opus 5.5 and Opus 5 refused. The mouse recovered well, a technical report is expected, and the results have not been peer-reviewed.

    Why it matters: It offers a concrete, first-hand account of an agent making treatment decisions and acting on a live animal, including an unexpected refusal that highlights alignment and reliability issues in time-sensitive lab work.

  1. Hacker News AI80

    Open-weight AI models can exploit the patch gap

    Researchers found that GLM 5.3, a widely available open-weight model released by Z.ai in August, could autonomously build exploits against all six Firefox releases between September 17 and October 26 using only information available at each version's release, at a marginal cost of about $1,000 per version. Visiting the model-built webpage caused the browser to read a local file and send it to an attacker's server without further user interaction, and the attacks also relied on an unpublished vulnerability that Mozilla has since patched in Firefox 159.0 (released October 27, 2026). Similar attacks on Google Chrome did not succeed as of writing, and the authors expect the threat to worsen as open-weight cyber capabilities improve.

    Why it matters: Documents a concrete, low-cost autonomous exploit capability in a freely available model, with implications for release practices across open- and closed-source software.

  1. Replit Blog60

    ViBench 2.0: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Software Building

    Replit releases ViBench 2.0, a long-horizon software development benchmark in which an agent builds a product from an empty project and then adds up to eighteen features on top of its own code, spanning seventeen products, 241 feature requests and 544 test plans. In Fireworks' official runs, GPT-6.1 Sol leads with a pass@1 of 65%, followed by GPT-6 Astra at 60% and Opus 5.5 at 49%, and no open-weight model passes a full build. Eight of the products are public on GitHub in the Harbor format, and results can be rerun from release v2.0.6 on the OpenHands-based harness.

    Why it matters: It offers concrete pass rates, costs and failure modes for frontier models on multi-feature product building, with a public, rerunnable harness.

  1. Artificial Analysis Articles60

    Announcing Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5

    Artificial Analysis released Intelligence Index v5, its biggest upgrade since v4, adding FrontierCode 2.0 and Terminal-Bench-Science and upgrading HLE-Diamond, AA-Omniscience v1.1 and CritPt v2, with 60% of the Index now based on private test sets or held-out answers. Claude Opus 5.5 (max) leads at 58, ahead of GPT-6 Astra (max, 57) and GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 55), while the open weights gap widens from 3 points to 12. It also launched the Progress Index v1, which tracks model capability over time on one continuous scale.

    Why it matters: It details a major benchmark revision and new leaderboard results, useful for readers tracking how frontier and open-weight models are measured.

  1. The Decoder78

    Anthropic's Claude now writes code and proves it safe automatically

    Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, working with partner Theorem, used Claude to generate roughly 180 million lines of mathematical proof code in a few weeks, verifying existing software from 123 open-source libraries in Google's OSS-Fuzz project by translating crash tests into mathematical problems and analyzing compiled machine code, with the Rocq program automatically checking the proofs. The researchers say Claude found hundreds of bugs, including as many security bugs in one week in a widely used PDF reader as are typically reported for that software in a year, and caught a logical error undetected for over a decade. Anthropic notes the proofs hold only under strict conditions—a specific processor architecture, single-threaded programs, and inputs under 64 MB—and that compute costs are steep, with individual proofs running up hundreds of millions of tokens.

    Why it matters: It offers a concrete look at AI-assisted formal verification, including its demonstrated bug-finding results and the practical limits Anthropic itself acknowledges.

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