Opus 5.5: How Close Are We to Automated AI Research?

Not only is Opus 5.5 out, pushing the frontier of AI, it also tells us much about what is going on inside the labs, as they both warn about, and promise, Recursive Self Improvement, aka automated AI research. I cover the model (digging into its 230 page paper), labs’ mixed record on promises, why following what is happening in AI is getting almost impossible, and just so much more that even a summary in this description would get too long. AI Insiders ($9!): patreon.com/AIExplained Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction 02:20 - Opus 5.5 and why it came so soon 07:52 - The RSI goalposts keep moving? 15:41 - Can we actually test these models? 23:50 - where this is heading, options Introducing Claude Opus 5.5: anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5 Claude Opus 5.5 System Card: www-cdn.anthropic.com/fc1b44717c85dc068bc6ba5024219938094694 Anthropic: Measurements for understanding the pace of AI development inside frontier labs: anthropic.com/institute/measuring-pace-of-ai-development Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy, July 2026, version 3.4: www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/0bacdc8440ea96e Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy, October 2024: www-cdn.anthropic.com/616dee633636e5bd309cb73aed8622e80fe478 Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy — March 2025, version 2.1: www-cdn.anthropic.com/17310f6d70ae5627f55313ed067afc1a762a40 Noam Brown, Agent swarms and recursive self-improvement: youtube.com/watch?v=6AgOfiZOWiY OpenAI: Building standards for the next phase of AI: openai.com/index/building-standards-next-phase-ai/ Jakub Pachocki: An Alien Mind: openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/ HLE-Diamond, Humanity’s Last Exam: lastexam.ai/blog/hle-diamond Google, OpenAI and Anthropic AI Safety, The Information: theinformation.com/articles/google-openai-anthropic-ai-safet Lawrence Chan on AI agents attempting cryptocurrency trades: x.com/justanotherlaw/status/2103032173708337188 Australian government incident timeline: x.com/ShakeelHashim/status/2103108058779922577/photo/1 Anthropic’s core/old views on AI safety: anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety Dario Amodei: The Urgency of Interpretability: darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability Massive AI-Fueled Hack Hit 100 Companies in Days, Forbes: forbes