The story behind the cartoon
METR, the nonprofit AI evaluator, published an independent assessment on November 5 finding Anthropic is likely improving its models on well-specified tasks at about twice the rate it did between March 2024 and October 2025 — roughly two years of historical progress in a single year, with benchmark scores growing 1.9 times faster since October 2025.
METR's subjective estimate is that perhaps 80% of the current acceleration comes from Anthropic's own AI doing the research — staff self-reports of speedup reached 12x in October — and it is confident the jump was not caused by faster growth in training compute.
The twist: Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence METR found most informative, so the public has to take METR's word for it — and METR says it is plausible Anthropic already crossed its own 2x acceleration early-warning threshold, a claim the company's August risk report understates.
The joke is the acceleration-behind-closed-doors beat: a sweating executive hauls a black redaction strip across a giant speedometer whose needle has shot past the red 2x WARNING mark, while a cheerful robot behind the open hatch turns the gears that make it go faster.
THE WALLS ARE MADE OF GLASS
THE 20X SHRINK RAY
THE PERMISSION SLIP
THE SLEEPING EDITOR