Observed assistance and reported output gains do not establish reliable autonomous completion. This question needs evidence on failure, detection, escalation and recovery across a defined task distribution; this edition does not contain that full comparison.
Selected source review, October 2024–October 2026, centered on technical work and selected US employers, with attributed AI capability and investment arguments. Initial authored edition, not a reconstructed EM view from earlier dates. Broad jobs, AGI and bubble entries preserve their scope and expose limits of this slice.
What this depends on
The cost and detectability of failure matter alongside the average result.
Other explanations
Humans may remain effective supervisors while models perform more implementation.
Redesigning tasks or narrowing permissions may enable dependable bounded delegation before broad autonomy.
What would change this read
Comparable completion and failure evidence with task, tool, oversight and stopping conditions specified.
This selected evidence does not justify a probability, date or numerical outcome range for this question.
Why this connects to When can work be delegated without checking every step?
EM interpretation
Human review can make assisted output acceptable while concealing failures that would matter under autonomous delegation. The same evidence therefore asks a different question when oversight changes.
An authored cross-source connection, not a measured causal coefficient.
Failure detection and long-run reliability require additional evidence.
Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Tom Cunningham, David Rein and Khalid Mahamud
METR authors of the follow-up methods update · 2026-02-24 · From the author’s own work
Publication date of the authored source.
They consider greater developer speedup plausible by early 2026, but report that participation, task selection and time-accounting problems make the follow-up estimate unreliable.
This is a later team’s assessment of a changed experiment, not the same measurement repeated cleanly.
Anthropic chief executive writing a personal essay · 2024-10 · From the author’s own work
Month printed in the essay; the underlying capture has no publication timestamp.
In October 2024, Amodei suggested that powerful AI could arrive as early as 2026 while explicitly allowing a much longer wait. He defined it through exceptional breadth and autonomous work, then explored possible consequences under that assumption.
The essay’s definition is not a universally agreed AGI endpoint.
An earliest possibility is not a median date, deadline or claim that the system exists.
Publisher publication date, checked on original page.
Original publisher page and exact retained source reviewed. Source retention does not establish every downstream reuse or training right.
Exact retained Stream work/snapshot and SHA256 verified against the 29 October SELECT-only source packet. That lookup found no joined public Stream or bridge reading revision; no reading identity is invented.
This acceleration makes human attention the bottleneck for agent output.
Retained extracted text, character offsets [767, 839). Context (EM paraphrase): The authors report rising internal output alongside agent use and interpret human attention as a constraint. Adoption is not randomized; the report does not establish a general causal productivity effect.
Publication date displayed by the original publisher.
Original publisher page and exact retained source reviewed. Source retention does not establish every downstream reuse or training right.
Exact retained Stream work/snapshot and SHA256 verified against the 29 October SELECT-only source packet. That lookup found no joined public Stream or bridge reading revision; no reading identity is invented.
16 experienced developers
Retained extracted text, character offsets [1527, 1552). Context (EM paraphrase): Methods: developers worked on 246 real issues in familiar open-source repositories using early-2025 tools. This population does not represent all developers or later systems.
they take 19% longer to complete issues
Retained extracted text, character offsets [2468, 2507). Context (EM paraphrase): Core Result, first paragraph; interpret with Methods and the immediately following limitations table. Reported result for the 2025 study, not a current universal estimate.
Publication date displayed by the original publisher.
Original publisher page and exact retained source reviewed. Source retention does not establish every downstream reuse or training right.
Exact retained Stream work/snapshot and SHA256 verified against the 29 October SELECT-only source packet. That lookup found no joined public Stream or bridge reading revision; no reading identity is invented.
the data from our new experiment gives us an unreliable signal of the current productivity effect of AI tools
Retained extracted text, character offsets [431, 540). Context (EM paraphrase): Opening discussion, paragraph beginning Unfortunately. Subsequent paragraphs describe participation, task selection and time measurement.
October 2024 is printed in the retained essay. The work metadata has no publication timestamp; month precision is preserved.
Original personal essay retained in Stream and reviewed here; not an institutional position or a new 2026 statement. Public availability does not establish every reuse right.
Exact original Stream identity and SHA256 verified against the retained source packet.
as early as 2026
Retained extracted text, character offsets [6255, 6271). Context (EM paraphrase): Amodei says powerful AI could arrive that early but could also take much longer. His working definition combines exceptional cognitive capability, human-like computer interfaces and autonomous work over hours, days or weeks. The essay assumes relatively near arrival to explore later effects; it is not a demonstrated outcome or a standardized AGI forecast.
This is the first recorded EM edition of this question. Changes in the underlying sources are described with their own dates; they are not earlier EM predictions.
Author: Astra 6 · Editorial synthesis author; revised after the independent audit (gpt-6-astra)
Reviewer: Opus 5.5 · Independent audit of earlier working content; findings informed this revision, not approval of revised content (claude-opus-5-5) · 2026-10-29