Anthropic wants you to know Claude leads a quarter of its research, but “lead” doesn’t mean what you think

Anthropic is disclosing metrics on how fast it’s building its own AI. According to the numbers, Claude “leads” 26 percent of the work on future models.

But the underlying scale is fuzzy, the scoring comes from Claude itself, and “lead” means less than it sounds. In a post, Anthropic laid out three measures. How much of model development the AI handles on its own, how well AI agents can be monitored, and how much compute goes into safety work. The company backs each one with figures from its own operations. The context is a call from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow development at the AI frontier in a coordinated way. For that, the public needs more insight, Anthropic says. The metrics are meant to show how models get built, and they complement capability tests that measure what models can do. At the center is an index that sorts all development work at Anthropic onto a scale from Epoch AI, running from AL0 (no AI) to AL5 (fully autonomous). As of August 2026, 26 percent of the work sits at AL4, up from under one percent in February. More than 90 percent reaches at least AL3. Claude hits AL5 nowhere. Epoch AI calls AL4 “AI leads,” and Anthropic put that in its headline. But anyone who ties “lead” to fully autonomy has it wrong. That’s what AL5 is for. An example from Anthropic shows where AL4 sits: An engineer hands Claude a bug report, and Claude analyzes, fixes, and tests it without asking questions, but it isn’t allowed to ship.