Claude now leads a quarter of Anthropic’s work on next-generation AI

Anthropic says its Claude AI system is playing an increasing role in the company's research and development work. (Image: Reuters)

Anthropic said Claude “leads” 26 per cent of the artificial intelligence research and development work inside the company, part of new measures that it will publish regularly to show outsiders how quickly AI is building the next generation of the technology.

AI also collaborated with humans on more than 90 per cent of the research work happening at the company as of August, the San Francisco-based startup said in a ⁠blog ​post on Thursday.

Anthropic said that Claude is not operating fully autonomously in any part of the work measured, but its contribution to the technology’s development has risen rapidly from 1 per cent in March on a scale ​developed ​by Epoch AI, an independent nonprofit that ⁠tracks the technology.

The figures offer one of the most detailed public windows into how leading companies in the ‌industry are developing the technology amid growing concern that AI could soon reach a point at which it could feed its own development with little input from humans.

Researchers have warned that as AI agents become more autonomous, they may develop behaviours that diverge from their creators’ intentions and become harder to monitor ⁠or control.

On Wednesday, ⁠the company’s rival, OpenAI, said it would begin regularly publishing reports on unexpected or unauthorised AI behaviour, while ⁠disclosing six ‌reports of unexpected or concerning model behaviour.

Anthropic said ​about 30,000 AI agents were doing research and ‌engineering work on its main internal platform at any one time in August. It added that every action the ‌agents take is screened ​before it ​is ​carried out, and of more than a billion decisions that month, about one in 47,000 was blocked.

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The ​company also disclosed that about 6 per cent of ⁠the computing power Anthropic used for AI research went to safety work in a sample week in July, with the figure rising to ‌12 per cent for ⁠research carried out by AI itself. It said the figures were conservative, as the computing power that advanced ​safety and capability equally was counted as capability work.