Anthropic has published a prototype index for measuring how much of its artificial-intelligence research is being done by Claude. In the company’s August snapshot, Claude “led” 26% of AI research and development tasks, meaning it could complete most of a task from a high-level prompt while a human supervised. Over 90% of the work met Anthropic’s broader definition of collaboration. The share at the lead level was below 1% in February. Anthropic also reported about 30,000 research and engineering agents on its most-used internal platform, with every action passing through an online monitor and a smaller share escalated for review.

The announcement turns a private development process into a public accounting problem. The index gives shape to a question that usually arrives as a prediction: how much of the work that builds the next model is already delegated to a model? Its limits are visible. Anthropic used its own systems to catalogue and judge tasks, froze the basket of work, and says the methodology needs third-party verification before laboratories can be compared. A percentage can therefore illuminate a trend while still carrying the institution’s assumptions inside it. Regular reporting would let workers, regulators and researchers watch the pace change instead of receiving a finished model as the first public evidence. The useful test is whether the number can survive an outside audit, a revised task list and a comparison with another lab’s records.