Anthropic said in an announcement Thursday that its Claude model is helping develop the next, more intelligent version of itself, leading 26% of Anthropic’s model research and development, meaning it can complete most of a given task “end-to-end from a high-level prompt” while still under human supervision, though it is not yet working completely autonomously. About 90% of the company’s research and development is done in “collaboration” with Claude, which Anthropic said means the model can do “large chunks of work under close human direction.” The announcement came as some leading figures in AI, led in large part by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns. Anthropic said models accelerating their own development could make it “more challenging for humans to understand or control these systems,” and urged other AI developers to share similar metrics regularly using a public methodology. The portion of work Claude “leads” was none in February; six months later, it was leading a quarter of research and development work, reaching that benchmark in August. Anthropic noted approximately 30,000 agents doing research and engineering work as of August, and recently committed to setting up external third-party evaluators embedded within the company to monitor safety efforts.