Have AI timelines suddenly moved?

A new METR report and follow-on analyses by Ajeya Cotra, the AI Futures team and Buck Shlegeris suggest Anthropic's capabilities progress accelerated around October 2025, with METR estimating that AI building AI accounts for roughly 80% of the speed-up, which would bring forecasts for superhuman AI R&D from 2028-2029 forward to 2027. The author notes that Anthropic's internal index shows a 1.5-1.9x speed-up while other labs have not accelerated and the overall frontier trend remains stable, and that outside organizations report 1.5-3x gains from AI rather than Anthropic's reported 12x. The piece concludes that the decisive data exists only inside Anthropic, and that the probability of a superhuman researcher in 2027 ranges from about 70% under METR's headline figure to about 20% using only public Epoch numbers and the field's earlier trajectory.