Anthropic Updates S-1: Admits Past Failure to Detect R&D Acceleration, Future Models May Hit Safety Policy Threshold
Anthropic disclosed in an S-1 amendment that over 90% of its code contributions were written by Claude, admitting safety measures may lag behind capability progress and potentially trigger its Responsible Scaling Policy thresholds.
U.S.-based AI company Anthropic filed Amendment No. 1 to its Form S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 2. Beyond the financial figures attracting market attention, TechCrunch noted that the amendment added new paragraphs to the risk factors section, admitting that the company had previously failed to detect significant acceleration in R&D until after it occurred, and stating that future models may soon reach the thresholds defined in its own Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP).
The document describes the practice of each generation of Claude assisting in the development of the next as "closing the loop." According to company disclosures, in September 2026, more than 90% of contributions to its codebase were written by Claude. On open-ended engineering problems without clear specifications, Claude's success rate reached approximately 90% in September based on internal benchmarks, an increase of about 50 percentage points over nine months. Additionally, the value of internal Claude usage increased more than 250-fold from January to September at list price.
However, this acceleration brings governance risks. Anthropic stated in the filing that increasing reliance on AI to accelerate R&D could cause model capabilities to progress faster than the company's ability to develop, verify, and implement corresponding safety measures. More problematically, evidence of such acceleration largely comes from lagging indicators, limiting the company's ability to predict or measure the speed of capability progress. The amendment cites internal estimates suggesting the company may soon meet the RSP definition for "dramatic acceleration brought about by AI," although no current model has been determined to exceed this threshold.