We have reached an agreement with OpenAI to conduct an independent review, with Redwood Research, of the model behavior observed during the Hugging Face incident. We will publish a blog post that describes the terms of our engagement, the scope covered, and tentative conclusions.

Could an AI company lose control of its own agents? To find out, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI let us (1) test their best internal models with CoT access, (2) review non-public info about capabilities, alignment, and control. The result: our first Frontier Risk Report.

We surveyed 349 technical researchers, engineers, and managers (in February–April 2026) about how they use AI tools at work. On average, participants self-report that AI use made their work 1.6–2.1x more valuable, and that this multiplier will grow over time.

Cool profile of @metr.org’s work in the NYT today! Particularly like this from my colleague Ajeya: “METR is an organization that asks... what we think would be most valuable for the world to know about A.I. and its risks, and then the answers are what they are.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/t....

How Do You Measure an A.I. Boom?

nytimes.com

Worth reading this in full. I come in skeptical, but this basically is a claim that an AI system at Alibaba attempted autonomous replication without human intervention. This excerpt was found and highlighted by Alexander Long. Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873

We’re correcting a mistake in our modeling that inflated recent 50%-time horizons by 10-20% (and reduced 80%-horizons). We inappropriately penalized steepness in task-length→success curve fits. This most affects the oldest and newest models, whose fits are less data-constrained.

Since early 2025, we've been studying how AI tools impact productivity among developers. Previously, we found a 20% slowdown. That finding is now outdated. Speedups now seem likely, but changes in developer behavior make our new results unreliable. We’re working to address this.

Our team is stretched thin at the moment! To continue upper-bounding the autonomy of AI agents, and developing evaluations for monitoring AI systems and their propensity to subvert human control, we need more great engineering and research staff. Please apply below or DM me!

METR@metr.org · 6mo ago

We estimate that Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50%-time-horizon of around 14.5 hours (95% CI of 6 hrs to 98 hrs) on software tasks. While this is the highest point estimate we’ve reported, this measurement is extremely noisy because our current task suite is nearly saturated.

Groundhog Day is a very METR-y holiday. Small animal emerges from a cave for only a moment, shares a forecast about timelines that's somewhat difficult to interpret, and then retreats into his cave for another year.

Today we published a critique of @metr.org’s time-horizon methodology by one of the paper’s lead authors, Thomas Kwa Link: metr.org/notes/2026-0...

I do occasionally now hear tech/finance people sincerely say that they need to focus on making more money to "escape the permanent underclass" It's important to emphasize how selfish orienting one's life around that goal is, rather than improving the median outcome for everyone

METR a few months ago had two projects going in parallel: a project experimenting with AI researcher interviews to track degree of AI R&D acceleration/delegation, and this project. When the results started coming back from this project, we put the survey-only project on ice.

METR@metr.org · last yr.

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

At METR, we’ve seen increasingly sophisticated examples of “reward hacking” on our tasks: models trying to subvert or exploit the environment or scoring code to obtain a higher score. In a new post, we discuss this phenomenon and share some especially crafty instances we’ve seen.

personal update: today is my last day with the Bluesky team! this is bittersweet news to share, but the great thing about an open network is you never really have to leave. I’ll be rooting for Bluesky and atproto from the outside 🫡💙

I spent a few days at Yale Law, while also listening to Sam Harris’s interview with Tom Holland about his book “Dominion”, and it’s striking how similar the role and vibe of the American judiciary is to a kind of secular priesthood. Robes, scholars interpreting sacred texts

When will AI systems be able to carry out long projects independently? In new research, we find a kind of “Moore’s Law for AI agents”: the length of tasks that AIs can do is doubling about every 7 months.

Bought a new bike this weekend :(

Taking science fiction seriously - thinking with effort about which ideas from sci-fi could become real soon and why and which couldn’t - has been so useful to me that it feels something like a core value

Cleaning a childhood bedroom and I’m struck by how much optimistic messaging about technology and space technology in particular I was surrounded by as a kid in the 90’s. Are kids still immersed in this stuff? I hope so

Sadly most physical goods that you’d be tempted to donate to someone are worth less than the cost in effort it would take to find someone who needs them

If this group is dedicated to advocating for what it seems like they’re dedicated to advocating for, it’s pretty wild that they exist!

Worlds with federal pre-emption of AI policy might be correlated with worlds with a huge expansion of social attention to AI (e.g. acute labor displacement), and a less "technocratic" reaction. Will the first big federal AI bill feel more like the CARES Act or the CHIPS Act?

I think AI would benefit from more social contact with scientists in fields whose questions don't have intuitively verifiable answers. To assess model capability, I find myself often relying on happenstance anecdotes I hear from e.g. lab-bench researchers months after the fact.

Will human-level AI be self-deploying/"productizing", or not? Will the "the product can explain to you how to use it and apply it" dynamic dramatically increase the adoption of AI relative to historical comparisons like AVs and steam engines?

A corollary to this: I think many policy initiatives would benefit from having more deeply engaged and informed opponents, and this is a neglected niche in many areas/topics. Detailed proposals having better (in the sense of more substantive) opponents is good for the world

Chris Painter@chris.bsky.social · 2y ago

I think the world could always benefit from more good-faith really in-depth critique of effortful technical/intellectual work. Many organizations that I collaborate with publish work hoping to have their ideas improved upon or attacked, but often surprisingly few people engage.

I think the world could always benefit from more good-faith really in-depth critique of effortful technical/intellectual work. Many organizations that I collaborate with publish work hoping to have their ideas improved upon or attacked, but often surprisingly few people engage.

I’ve been wondering, has the (bad) reaction to this actually been that unusual?

Paul Hünermund@p-hunermund.com · 2y ago

"The public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. From the jokes on social media to the comments under news stories, the whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle." link.newyorker.com/click/377824...

Luigi Mangione's review of the Unabomber manifesto on Goodreads