# A machine that builds the next machine, and a report that landed before the roadshow (slim) > Vlad Cealicu on METR's assessment of Anthropic, published on 5 November 2026. Anthropic is improving its models on well-specified tasks at about twice its earlier rate, METR guesses about 80% of that is AI, and it saw no bottleneck for the next year. What that does and doesn't say about acceleration, and why the timing, between the public S-1 and the roadshow with most of the best evidence redacted, deserves some scepticism. - Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-builds-the-next-machine.md (~3,100 tokens) · this version ~1,480 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-builds-the-next-machine.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-builds-the-next-machine - Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07 - Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data) By Vlad Cealicu, 7 November 2026. 1,430 words, about 6 min to read. - ≈2x: the rate Anthropic improves its models on well-specified tasks, against March 2024 to October 2025 - ≈80%: of that speed-up METR guesses is due to AI - 10 days: from the public S-1 on 26 October to METR's report on 5 November, with the roadshow able to start on 10 November What METR found, and when. METR published its assessment of how fast Anthropic is improving its own models on Thursday 5 November, and I read the thread at quarter to three on Saturday morning, which is about when I read most things. Anthropic's prospectus, public since 26 October, makes the same claim in sales language, that "each new version of a Claude model directly accelerates development of the next" [[2]](#ref-2), so the independent report agrees with the central pitch of the document Anthropic is using to sell its shares, and it came out in the ten days between that document going public and the earliest date the roadshow can start. ## What the numbers say The main number comes from Anthropic's version of the Epoch Capabilities Index, a benchmark score tracked across its models over time, and since October 2025 it has grown at 1.9 times the earlier rate, with a 95% interval of 1.5 to 2.8 and robustness checks that gave anything from 1.1 to 2.9 [[1]](#ref-1). METR is confident the speed-up didn't come from growing training compute faster, though the evidence for that is redacted [[1]](#ref-1), which leaves better algorithms, better data and the people, and the people say Claude is doing a lot of the work. ## Does it accelerate, or not I think it does, and I think it's a smaller thing than "AI is building itself". Where I'd push back is on reading 2x as the speed of research as a whole. ## The timing Anthropic filed its draft S-1 confidentially on 1 June [[3]](#ref-3), more than two months before METR started, so the assessment wasn't arranged around a filing nobody knew about, and the dates after that line up closely with the IPO. 2026 1. **1 June** (ipo). Anthropic files its draft S-1 confidentially [[3]](#ref-3) 2. **12 August** (metr). Anthropic starts sharing confidential information with METR, for what was planned as four weeks [[1]](#ref-1) 3. **15 October** (metr). Anthropic announces it has given METR employee-like access, and that METR will publish [[4]](#ref-4) 4. **22 October** (metr). METR hands Anthropic its full report, about 100 pages [[1]](#ref-1) 5. **25 October** (redactions). Anthropic sends its redaction guidance [[1]](#ref-1) 6. **26 October** (ipo). the S-1 goes public, and the same day METR sends its draft public report [[1]](#ref-1) [[2]](#ref-2) 7. **27 to 29 October** (redactions). Anthropic tightens the redaction guidance, METR revises to match, and they agree on about five more days [[1]](#ref-1) 8. **5 November** (metr). METR publishes [[1]](#ref-1) 9. **10 November** (ipo). the earliest the roadshow can start, with a debut reported for as soon as the week of 16 November [[5]](#ref-5) Anthropic had the right to redact any non-public information, every piece of information in the public report was approved for release by Anthropic, and METR says Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence it found most informative for its conclusions, which Anthropic says was to remove confidential information that could help other AI developers [[1]](#ref-1). I think the boring explanation covers most of it, since a company in registration has its lawyers reading every public word about it, and redaction guidance getting tighter in the days after the S-1 went public is what you'd expect, and METR says the work started in August, it took no payment from Anthropic, and it thinks it "extremely unlikely Anthropic was actively trying to mislead us" [[1]](#ref-1). What bothers me is what reaches the public and when. ## What would change my mind Anthropic could publish the redacted evidence once the quiet period is over, or enough of it that someone outside METR can check the 2x and the 80% for themselves, and it could put the compute allocation check back in with a date attached. ## Where I stand I'm a paying customer, the review panel that grades listings on this site runs on Claude, which is why Anthropic's own listings carry a label, and I wrote about [what the S-1 says about agents](/blog/anthropic-s-1) on the day it was filed, so read all of the above with that in mind. --- More in [Opinion](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/opinion/index.md) - Older: [A machine that runs all night, and why the labs aren't at the forefront](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-runs-all-night.md) - All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md Anchor Terminal grades the tools AI agents run on, with a source for every score. ## References Read on 7 November 2026. Quotes are as published. [1] METR, 5 November 2026. Independent assessment of AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic. [2] Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 Registration Statement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on 26 October 2026. Source for the filing date, the quote on each Claude model accelerating the next, and the risk factor on lagging indicators of acceleration. [3] Anthropic, 1 June 2026. Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC. [4] Anthropic, 15 October 2026. An update on independent evaluators. [5] Yahoo Finance, 5 November 2026. Everything you need to know ahead of Anthropic's IPO.