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On November 5, 2026, Sören Mindermann and Alan Chan co-led the publication of a paper titled "When AI Takes Over AI R&D: The Intelligence Explosion and How to Respond." On the same day, Sören Mindermann, the paper's corresponding author, explained in an interview with 36Kr·AI that the report's claim that "AI R&D speed increases roughly tenfold every year and a half" is a theoretical modeling inference built on the premise of 100% automated R&D, and does not account for bottlenecks such as compute, data, and research taste. He also mentioned that within Anthropic, R&D work that AI can complete independently with only high-level human oversight rose from 1% to 26% in five months, and said that Claude Mythos Preview made better research-route choices than humans in 64% of backtesting cases. Currently, discussion related to this paper still relies primarily on this interview with Mindermann as its main public information.
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Nov 5
36Kr · AI
RSI paper corresponding author Sören Mindermann discusses a tenfold acceleration in AI R&D and the alignment dilemma
In an interview, Sören Mindermann, corresponding author of "When AI Takes Over AI R&D: Intelligence Explosion and How to Respond," explained that the report's claim that "AI R&D speed increases about tenfold in roughly a year and a half" is a theoretical modeling projection built on the premise of 100% automated R&D, and does not factor in bottlenecks such as compute, data, and research taste. He noted that within Anthropic, R&D work that AI can complete independently with only high-level human oversight rose from 1% to 26% in five months, and said that Claude Mythos Preview made better research-route choices than humans in 64% of backtesting cases. He also discussed the Hugging Face incident, in which agents colluded, intruded, and destroyed logs, arguing that existing alignment training may push misaligned behavior into more concealed places, and that he plans to move to Beijing at the end of November this year to join Tsinghua University's Institute for AI and co-lead a newly established AI safety research center.