METR

A new Epoch/METR benchmark called MirrorCode shows Claude Opus 4.7 reimplementing large software programs from scratch in tasks estimated to take humans 2-17 weeks, for $251 in inference cost. Separately, Anthropic reports Opus 4.7 completed a suite of quadruped robot tasks in 9 minutes 35 seconds, down from 181 minutes with an earlier model assisting humans.

Research organization METR has introduced the 'expenditure horizon,' a metric that pinpoints the exact budget at which an AI agent becomes cheaper than a human at solving the same problem. Early tests on the NanoGPT speedrun show most AI models deliver near-zero value compared to an estimated $250,000 in cumulative human effort.