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AM Aalok Mehta Aalok Mehta Director of the Wadhwani AI Center at CSIS, where he leads research on AI policy.

“What they did in this report is that they had a lot of access to Anthropic data. They were provided access by the company to a bunch of internal data, researchers, et cetera. And they found that overall AI progress at Anthropic has accelerated to roughly twice the rate that we saw historically, specifically last year. And they estimate that about 80% of that speedup is directly attributable to AI. So essentially, AI being used to accelerate progress in AI.”

The AI Policy Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026

“What they did in this report is that they had a lot of access to Anthropic data. They were provided access by the company to a bunch of internal data, researchers, et cetera. And they found that overall AI progress at Anthropic has accelerated to roughly twice the rate that we saw historically, specifically last year. And they estimate that about 80% of that speedup is directly attributable to AI. So essentially, AI being used to accelerate progress in AI.” — Aalok Mehta, The AI Policy Podcast

Context

Mehta is introducing METR's report on AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic, published November 5. This is the core finding the rest of the segment on recursive self-improvement, timelines and policy builds on.

Transcript

The AI Policy Podcast Around 18:58 into the episode
Chris Gorin

thanks for letting me go on that rant.

Speaker 4

That's what we're here for. All right, now I'm going to hand it off to you, Lok, to talk about this really remarkable METER report and why it's kind of been so shocking and so concerning for some in the AI safety community. So, yeah, take it away.

Aalok Mehta

Yeah, so there have been big developments in the last week, week and a half in the AI safety space as well. And in particular, this report that was published by METER, which is an AI evaluation and research nonprofit organization on November 5th, related to AI RD. So, what they did in this report is that they had sort of a lot of access to Anthropic data. They were provided access by the company to a bunch of internal data researchers, et cetera. And they found that overall AI progress at Anthropic has accelerated to roughly twice the rate that we saw historically or specifically last year. And that they estimate that about 80% of that speedup is directly attributable to AI. So, essentially, AI being used to accelerate progress in AI. So, this is raising major concerns amongst a number of people who follow AI issues closely. And the reason for this is because there's long been this idea that there's this thing called recursive self-intelligence, recursive self-improvement. And what that means is that once AI learns how to substantially improve itself, you have this sort of runaway effect where the progress of AI then proceeds incredibly quickly, rapidly sort of leaves the ability for humans to oversee it. And then we enter situations where…

Chris Gorin

Yeah, that was the first thing that sort of grabbed my attention was their post where they were just saying that, you know, the public's going to have to rely on us on our own judgment because of how much this has been redacted.

Aalok Mehta

Yeah, I mean, I think this highlights a problem, right? Like as we've seen in the AI space, right, there's a move towards more evaluations, external evaluations, organizations coming in and doing oversight of companies. But something like this raises, I think, a bigger question, which is this is a…

Chris Gorin

Right, or at least we don't know what the information the government has is, right? I mean, maybe Anthropic is providing this information to the government, but we don't know. It's all behind closed doors. There was, I believe, a post from an Anthropic co-founder saying that they're going to come…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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