Sunday, 8 November 2026
METR's Outside Check Finds Anthropic Improving About 1.9 Times Faster Than Before October 2025
METR’s Outside Check Finds Anthropic Improving About 1.9 Times Faster Than Before October 2025
Days after Anthropic’s IPO filing warned investors it may “imminently” meet its own definition of AI-driven acceleration, the outside view is in. METR, the independent evaluator, spent August 12 to October 29 inside Anthropic and published its assessment on Thursday. The new number: Anthropic’s internal benchmark scores have grown about 1.9 times faster than before October 2025 (95% interval 1.5–2.8x), and METR is “confident” that more training compute is not the cause. Its guess is that about 80% of the speed-up comes from AI itself — a guess it calls highly uncertain — and it found no convincing bottleneck for the next 12 months. Staff polls put the internal uplift at about 12x, which METR calls “very loose evidence”. The catch is in the footnotes: Anthropic had the right to redact, and blacked out most of the evidence METR found most informative, so METR says the report does not deliver transparency about the evidence. An audit you mostly can’t read is still an audit — just not one you can check.
Source: METR, November 5, 2026
China Blocks the China Part of SoftBank’s $5.4 Billion ABB Robotics Deal
SoftBank’s plan to buy ABB’s robotics division, announced in October 2025 at an enterprise value of $5.375 billion, has hit a wall in its biggest market. ABB says SoftBank told it that China’s foreign investment security review office “has prohibited the acquisition of the ABB Robotics business in China.” The deal had already cleared China’s competition review; the security review is a separate gate. No official reason was published. ABB and SoftBank say they are “in close dialogue”, and SoftBank is reportedly weighing whether to apply again. It is the second big AI-era deal China has stopped this year, after Meta’s purchase of the agent startup Manus. Masayoshi Son wants robots for his AI empire — Beijing has said no and, so far, not why.
Source: Robotics 24/7, November 5, 2026
Meta Buys Conductor, the App That Runs Several Coding Agents at Once
Meta has bought Conductor, a Mac app that lets a developer run several AI coding agents — Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s among them — side by side, each in its own copy of the project. The team joins Meta Superintelligence Labs; the price was not disclosed. CEO Charlie Holtz promised “something new” early next year. For current users the clock is already running: no new sign-ups since November 4, Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down on November 20, when cloud data starts being deleted, and the local app gets fixes only until early 2027. Paying subscribers get refunds. The same day, OpenAI announced it is buying Pierre Computer Company, a code-storage startup. In the race for developers, the cheapest way to win a power user is apparently to buy the tool they already like.
Source: Conductor, November 4, 2026
Perplexity Launches “Teammates”, Agents That Keep Working on a Project Between Your Questions
Perplexity has launched Teammates, named agents for ongoing work rather than one-off answers. Each one remembers a project’s goals, task history and shared files, follows up on its own without a new prompt, and can hand work to another teammate. Each runs in its own isolated desktop and browser; you can review its work, take over the desktop or redirect it. Add one to a Slack channel and colleagues can assign it tasks there. It is a research preview, on the web first and iOS soon, for Max subscribers only, and it draws on the plan’s monthly credits. The examples on offer are marketing, sales, support and operations. The pitch is a colleague who never stops working — which is also the description of a colleague who never stops spending your credits.
Source: Perplexity, November 4, 2026