Measuring AI R&D Automation

In contrast to even a year ago, AI systems now write most of the code inside the companies that build them. As more of the AI research and development (R&D) pipeline is automated, could AI progress radically accelerate in an "intelligence explosion," where years of advances are compressed into months or less? Preliminary evidence suggests that it could. In this work, we assess this evidence, analyze an intelligence explosion's potential impacts, and propose policy responses. AI systems are on track to automate most AI R&D work within a few years, and possibly all of it. If this triggers an intelligence explosion, it could dramatically bring forward AI's benefits, but also pose extreme risks: capabilities growth could accelerate far beyond what society can keep up with, humanity could lose control over superhuman AI systems, and checks on power within and between states, companies, and branches of government could be severely eroded. Although there remains much uncertainty about these possibilities, the high stakes warrant serious further attention. Policymakers should urgently obtain more visibility into the automation of AI R&D, develop ways to steer and constrain an intelligence explosion, and prepare society to adapt to an intelligence explosion's impacts.

AI is already writing a majority of code for frontier AI labs. This creates a safety risk if there is insufficient human oversight. Existing work proposes minimum comprehension thresholds and unaided checks to mitigate this. To our knowledge, however, there is currently no published frontier-AI assurance regime that requires demonstrated evidence that the responsible humans understand what they are building as a precommitted condition for continuing development or usage. We propose comprehension audits, a novel development-process assurance mechanism in which the responsible people explain R&D contributions to auditors to demonstrate understanding. With independent administration and graded reports, they provide a gate: development of a contribution stops based on a failure to demonstrate human understanding until remediated, with escalating consequences for repeated failures. Our analysis of leading open-source AI projects finds increased output of code with reduced human review commentary rates per line of code, with far lower rates for automated fleet accounts. We advocate for labs to conduct them with embedded independent auditors.

Current frontier AI safety evaluations emphasize static benchmarks, third-party annotations, and red-teaming. In this position paper, we argue that AI safety research should focus on human-centered evaluations that measure harmful capability uplift: the marginal increase in a user's ability to cause harm with a frontier model beyond what conventional tools already enable. We frame harmful capability uplift as a core AI safety metric, ground it in prior social science research, and provide concrete methodological guidance for systematic measurement. We conclude with actionable steps for developers, researchers, funders, and regulators to make harmful capability uplift evaluation a standard practice.