epistemic status: I have low confidence in these findings, primarily because my anecdotal experience (I'm a researcher) is that AI usage in research has been changing more quickly in the recent months, so analysis of the last year gives a very fuzzy picture. A lot of the reports rely on Pangram or self-reporting, which is another methodological weakness. I wanted a better idea of AI usage and impact in the research community, so I spent a few days reading recent articles (mostly published in the last few months, some are a year old) and summarized them here. Recent AI usage for research Anthropic claims that 26% of AI R&D work is now being led by AI (still some human oversight). Only 6 months ago they claim researchers had primarily been "collaborating" with AI and AI led research less than 1% of the time. This is a significant change in a short period of time. OpenAI claims it has built an "automated research intern", an AI agent capable of accomplishing well-scoped problems with some human steering, helping researchers move at increasing rates and solve more complex tasks. They claim 70% of researchers now run 4 or more agents concurrently, that researchers are running 1.6x more experiments each day compared to 2025, and that agents are successfully performing complex research tasks without any intervention 15 percentage points more often compared to 7 months ago. The longer tasks (4-8 hours) which were successful still require at least one intervention over half of the ti…

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