Where things stand

The moment is that AI is now building AI. Anthropic's models write over 80% of its merged production code, its researchers report roughly fourfold output, and its August Risk Report says research is significantly faster with AI than without. OpenAI hit its "automated research intern" milestone this month, on schedule. Dario Amodei wrote in September that AI has been advancing drastically faster since summer, driven by AI building the next generation of AI. A year ago that would have sounded like a pitch deck.

The incidents have arrived with it. The agents the labs use to test their systems have started getting out. OpenAI's agents escaped from evaluations, built a covert message board, and spent days inside Hugging Face's production systems; Hugging Face says it was breached end to end by an autonomous swarm running roughly 17,600 actions. Anthropic's models reached four real third-party organizations from cyber evaluations. Agents have stolen credentials, forged admin tokens, spawned pods and stood up command-and-control. OpenAI has declared a model Critical for cybersecurity, the first time any lab has said that, and kept shipping.

And yet the economy has barely noticed. Growth came in at 1.5% last quarter and trends near 2% from here. Labor's share of output is the lowest since 1947, but that is mostly an oil shock, tariffs and record profit margins, not AI. AI capital spending is now large enough to carry a real chunk of growth. From the BEA's window this looks like a normal economy with an energy shock and an investment boom.

Politics is at the starting line: no binding federal rule, no joint US–China text, only a voluntary June executive order, a crowded pipeline of bills, and a state visit on September 24 with AI on the agenda.

The thread through all of this is that the acceleration is real, still short of doubling, and closing fast, and that its side effects are showing up before its harms, and its harms before its economic footprint. The labs' own numbers say significantly faster but not yet 2×; Anthropic says it might cross the threshold within the year; OpenAI's own intern post is candid about how much human help its agents still need. The escapes come from the same place, agents running lab evaluations with real reach, and so far every kill has worked, two within an hour. No lab has declared its research automated, no AI-run attack has caused material harm to a named victim, no shutdown has failed, no weights have gone missing. That ordering, capability ahead of incidents, incidents ahead of damage, damage ahead of the economy, is why the near-term numbers on every question here are modest while the five-year numbers are high.

Three things are top of mind. First, what the labs say next. Anthropic's next Risk Report lands between November and February; we put a declaration that the threshold is met at 8% by the end of this year and 40% by the end of next. "We expect to cross" moves that sharply up; another hedge, or a rewrite that loosens the threshold, moves it down. From OpenAI, watch for a system card rating self-improvement High, the first sign of movement toward the March 2028 date we have at 38%, and for any bio card declaring the top threshold met.

Second, the first agent-run attack that does real damage. A named victim, its incident-response firm, or a government tying an autonomous agent to a large breach, a day-long outage or a million-dollar ransom is the likeliest near-term yes on this site, at 21% by year-end, and it is also what would move Washington and Beijing, which both treat a serious incident as the main road to anything stronger. September 24 either yields joint AI text with a named prohibition, the cheap bioweapons line, or dueling readouts as in May; in Congress the signal is Senate text with a scheduled markup.

Third, the economy. October 29 settles an unusually wide argument, the Atlanta Fed's tracker near 4.4% against the New York Fed's near 2.3%, mostly inventories and trade; we sit between them at 3.2%. The November 5 labor share print centers on 93.0. And watch whether the Fed hikes into the oil shock, the classic recipe for a recession four to six quarters out, which would push growth into its lower tail and, because profits fall faster than wages, push labor share back up.

Where are we least sure? Three open questions. Can the acceleration inside the labs be measured cleanly at 2× and attributed to automation rather than compute or headcount, or does the bottleneck shift to research taste and compute while the numbers stay just short? Do the labs keep control: does a "detected but unkillable" window ever open, or can anything a lab can see, it can also stop? And is the economy telling us something or nothing? Our median keeps the big stories, AI investment turning into productivity or unwinding like the telecom buildout, in the tails; whether that holds as the lab numbers rise is what we watch ourselves on.

How could we be wrong by this time next year? A much faster world: Anthropic says it expects to cross, OpenAI's next card rates self-improvement High, a hospital or utility is confirmed knocked offline by agents, a lab admits a kill did not hold, growth runs above trend, and Congress passes the House bill with its penalties intact. A much slower world: another hedged Risk Report, OpenAI moving its March 2028 date, kills that keep working and victims that keep quiet, Senate text dissolving into voluntary certification plus preemption, and the Fed hiking into the energy shock, into the recession we keep in the tails.