Review of the "Risks from automated R&D" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)

METR reviewed the "Risks from automated R&D" section of Anthropic's August 2026 Risk Report and agrees that internally deployed models as of July 15th posed low risk of directly automating R&D or causing acute catastrophic risks. However, METR argues the report's claim that Anthropic had not crossed its 2x Acceleration Threshold relies on contestable judgment calls not clearly communicated publicly, and that the public report understates the acceleration occurring; METR believes it is plausible the threshold had been crossed. METR finds the argument that the Full Substitution Threshold had not been crossed broadly compelling, while noting lower confidence due to a lack of high-confidence unsaturated benchmarks.