民主党内部AI政策分歧加剧，METR报告指Anthropic研发加速翻倍

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Housekeeping: The Weekly Briefing is off next week for our team retreat; we’ll be back on November 20.

NEED TO KNOW

• A new report from METR estimates that the pace of AI improvements at Anthropic has doubled in the past year, thanks in large part to AI speeding up internal development.
• Tech stocks tanked on fears that the blue tsunami will lead to a slower data center buildout.
• Scoop: Innovation Council Action’s directors include execs at David Sacks’ VC firm, and an apparent political consultant who “oversees” JD Vance’s donor relationships.

But first…

THE BIG STORY

Tuesday was a paradigm-shifting moment for AI policy. The polling proved correct: voters hate unchecked AI. And though ballots weren’t cast solely based on AI, it likely touched on issues that did determine votes — among them the economy, angst about corruption and a general sense that the government is serving wealthy interests over the will of the people.

If 2026 was the election where voters put AI on the agenda, 2028 will be the one where they judge whether politicians were able to do anything about it. Because Democrats won, they will be most closely watched. The AI policies passed over the next two years have to affect how voters feel in their day-to-day lives — enough to continue supporting the party controlling Congress.

That pressure is likely to make Democrats fracture. They won in huge numbers, but with little consensus: many different types of Democrats won. Adam Hamilton won in Kansas on a moderate, religious platform, while Abdul El-Sayed won as a progressive firebrand. AI policy platforms in this election ranged from data privacy law revamps to elaborate tax plans.

The divides over AI within the Democratic party are often characterized as moderates versus progressives, and to some extent that’s true. It is clear what the progressive agenda is: ideologically led by Senator Bernie Sanders, they have coalesced around moratoriums and worker protections, typically tax programs such as the one proposed by Reps. Greg Casar and Sara Jacobs in August. Business-friendly Dems often gravitate towards moderated versions of these proposals: not data center moratoria, but community benefit agreements; not banning advanced AI development, but pacing it.

However, the party is likely to fracture into more than two camps on AI. There’s the “low hanging fruit” crowd: Democrats who think it’s best to start incrementally with the policies most people agree on, such as federalizing routine disclosure requirements already codified in states such as California and New York, or limiting addictive features that target children. There’s also a group which has coalesced around AI safety lobby demands, such as independent auditing of frontier models and limiting or blocking chip exports to foreign adversaries. Many more Democrats will be entering the fray for the first time, and will each adopt different approaches on AI. Some will take cues from lobbyists on how to vote but resist making proposals themselves, some will give themselves a crash course and propose left field policy ideas. Many will fall somewhere in between.

The result is that policies which up until this point haven’t been given a fair shake might see serious consideration. After 40 out of 41 jurisdictions voted against unchecked data center development in ballot measures on Tuesday, bans on new data centers, once treated as merely political signaling from the left, could see serious consideration. Laws imposing liability on developers for AI-generated harms could be on the table, too, as could bans on superintelligence. Aggressive and public investigations, both of the Trump White House’s relationship with AI companies, and of the AI companies’ responses to recent hacking incidents, seem imminent.

The Overton window has shifted, and that will lead to discourse and debate over AI policy that couldn’t even be entertained in the last Congress. The challenge will be whether Democratic leadership can identify a winning platform amid the noise. Among my sources, hopes are high but expectations low. As one Democratic party insider put it: “There is no plan. It’s just various tribes warring in the dark.”

— Veronica Irwin

ALSO NOTABLE

A new report provides significant evidence that AI itself is driving an acceleration in the pace of AI development — alarming researchers who now fear “recursive self-improvement” might be even closer than expected.

METR spent several months working with Anthropic, looking at internal metrics and interviewing employees to estimate how much AI was contributing to the company’s own AI development.

The conclusions are stark. METR found that the pace of capability improvements on “well-specified tasks” was likely around twice as fast in October 2026 as it was between March 2024 and October 2025. “We believe that a majority of this acceleration in capability improvement is likely now driven by AI being used in AI R&D.”

Full recursive self-improvement — the point at which an AI model can autonomously train an improved successor — has not been achieved. “AI is not yet able to make highly significant and fully autonomous contributions to the most important parts of the model training process,” METR says. But it notes that Anthropic employees “described significant ‘signs of life’ implying such contributions could occur soon.” It also highlighted that Anthropic redacted evidence from the public report suggesting that “the rate of growth could be undergoing continuous acceleration, e.g hyperbolic growth.”

As those excerpts make clear, it is very hard for outsiders to know what to make of all this. “Anthropic redacted a majority of the evidence we found most informative,” METR says, citing commercial sensitivity and the risks of “handing out a roadmap for others to go faster.” Those redactions, METR says, means “the public must rely on our judgment more than we consider ideal.”

Perhaps the most notable thing about the report, though, is the reaction it’s garnered. Along with outrage at Anthropic for its redactions, the response from AI safety researchers has been some of the most visceral panic and alarm I’ve seen in some time. Of course, you should take that with a grain of salt. But if there is one thing to take away from this, it is that many AI safety researchers are more worried than they were yesterday. “I feel sick after reading today’s METR report,” wrote ex-OpenAI preparedness team member Dane Sherburn. “I’m worried for my friends and family. I don’t know what evidence people will need to see before they start taking these risks seriously.”

— Shakeel Hashim

THIS WEEK ON TRANSFORMER

What the blue tsunami means for AI policy — Shakeel Hashim on how the Dem’s historic win will shake out for AI

The AI Power List — Transformer partnered with New York Magazine to profile 26 people shaping AI

Innovation Council’s directors include execs at David Sacks’ VC firm — Shakeel Hashim reports on what a new filing tells us about who’s behind the pro-AI group

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THE DISCOURSE

Rep. Yassamin Ansari has plans for our freshly-blue House and Congress:

• “Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence.”

Scott Alexander thinks some AI safetyists’ plan to “Stop Unilaterally + Raise Awareness” (SURA, for short) is bad:

• “[T]he current consensus in favor of SURA comes … from people accidentally shoehorning themselves into a mass-politics-shaped container, which forbids subtlety and demands clear villains.”
• [T]he presence of alignment-pilled companies is one of the strongest levers [for a pause] … Unilateral disarmament makes it harder to bring China to the bargaining table.”