Role here: evidence artifact for pace / automation claims
Metric 1 - AI-led AI R&D
Item
Value
Instrument
Anthropic R&D Automation Index
Scale
Epoch AI Automation Levels AL0-AL5
As of
August 2026
AL4 ("leads") share
26% of Anthropic AI R&D work
≥ AL3 ("collaborates")
>90%
AL5 fully autonomous
none in measured subsets
Appendix method: sample staff weeks in July 2026 → ~15,000 tasks → frozen tree (542 nodes / 378 leaves) → Claude research + Claude judge ratings → person-time weights. Human agreement check reported in-appendix.
Metric 2 - Oversight of AI agents
Item
Online monitors
Offline monitors
Role
Block/steer before execution
Review after the fact
Coverage (stated)
100% of actions on the measured platform
100% ingested after the fact
Platform scale
~30,000 agents on most-used internal research/engineering platform
same
August signal
>1B decisions; ~0.002% blocked (~1 in 47,000)
~1-2 / 1000 transcripts flagged; ~50/week high-priority human escalations
Metric 3 - Compute allocation
Item
Value
Window
13-20 July (one week snapshot)
Safety share of AI R&D compute
~6%
Safety share of AI-driven AI R&D compute
~12%
Coding rule
Dual-purpose tokens counted as non-safety (conservative)
Note
Safeguards-classifier compute excluded from these shares
Appendix pointers
AL3 vs AL4 concrete pipeline-fix vignette in footnotes
Compute classifier prompt excerpt for safety vs R&D labeling
Plan to embed third-party evaluators with internal-comparable access
Reading rule
Cite numbers with as-of dates and definitions. The 26% figure is AL4 on a person-time-weighted AI R&D basket. It is not headcount, revenue, or total company work.
The Frontier, “Record: Anthropic's three pace metrics and appendix”, 20 Sept 2026
TLDR
Automation Index, agent oversight table, and safety compute shares from the Institute post, with method notes.
Plain text
Frontier Survey. “Record: Anthropic's three pace metrics and appendix.” The Frontier. 20 Sept 2026. https://www.thefrontier.dev/articles/anthropic-pace-metrics-record
BibTeX
@misc{frontier_anthropic_pace_metrics_record_2026,
title = {Record: Anthropic's three pace metrics and appendix},
author = {{Frontier Survey}},
howpublished = {The Frontier},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
url = {https://www.thefrontier.dev/articles/anthropic-pace-metrics-record}
}
Full text may be reprinted with canonical link and byline.
Anthropic's August 2026 snapshot puts Claude at AL4 on 26% of its AI R&D basket. The number is a person-time-weighted automation index on that AI R&D basket.
Evidence document for the 16 September 2026 MLPerf Inference v6.1 round, focused on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 preview claims and the supporting MLCommons artifacts.
