Anthropic updates prospectus, acknowledges it previously failed to promptly detect AI R&D acceleration

In an updated prospectus (S-1/A), Anthropic changed “may be unable to identify before R&D significantly accelerates” to “has previously failed to identify,” acknowledging that AI R&D acceleration has already occurred internally and been noticed by human teams only after the fact. The document states that under the self-acceleration threshold of its Responsible Scaling Policy, crossing the line means completing in 1 year, with AI assistance, 2 years of R&D progress at the 2018 to 2024 baseline pace, and that internal estimates suggest future models will soon reach this line. Third-quarter internal data show that by September more than 90% of code in the internal codebase was written by Claude, that each engineer's daily code commits were more than 45 times the 2024 average, and that internal spending on Claude calls from January to September rose more than 250-fold at public list prices. Page 188 of the document states that even if technically feasible, the company will not let Claude fully automatically design and build the next generation of frontier models without human oversight, and is considering requiring human sign-off review for key decisions. To guard against theft of model weights, the start of pretraining for a new frontier base model was delayed by more than a month.