Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei shared that its AI chatbot Claude "leads" 26 percent of its AI R&D work. By "leads," the company means Claude can complete most of a task end-to-end from a high-level prompt while a human supervises.

Anthropic also claims AI does at least "large chunks of work under close human direction" on more than 90 percent of its research, which includes the 26 percent Claude leads. However, the company says the chatbot is "not operating fully autonomously for any measured subset of AI R&D work."

These stats come from the first of three proposed measurements focused on "AI-led AI R&D." Using an index of how much of its AI research and development is performed by Claude and an automation rating scale developed by Epoch AI, Anthropic created a chart plotting Claude's "automation level" since August 2025.

The company also proposed ways to measure oversight of AI agents and track compute devoted to AI R&D. The hope is that more transparency could make it easier to respond to potentially out-of-control AI development. Amodei's stance on AI safety even got Elon Musk to agree on X.