Anthropic says Claude leads 26% of AI R&D

Anthropic published a prototype R&D Automation Index on September 17 showing that as of August 2026 Claude leads 26% of the company's AI research and development work on Epoch AI's automation scale, meaning it can complete most of a task from a high-level prompt while a human supervises. More than 90% of measured R&D is at least at the collaborate level, and Claude is not fully autonomous on any measured subset. Reuters said the lead share rose from about 1% in March; Anthropic also reported about 30,000 agents on its main internal platform, roughly one in 47,000 actions blocked, and about 6% of AI R&D compute going to safety in a July sample week.