The top photos of the day by AP's photojournalists

From front page news to powerful moments you may have missed, this gallery showcases today's top photos, chosen by Associated Press photo editors.

An Indian army soldier lights an earthen lamp on a fence to celebrate Diwali, near the Line of Control that divides Kashmir region between India and Pakistan, in Akhnoor sector, India, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Channi Anand)

Dall sheep wander through cliffs at the edge of Chugach State Park, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Ethiopians fleeing fighting in their country cross into Kenya near Qlita village, Moyale, Kenya, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Ngugi)

A steam train travels through the autumn-colored Harz Mountains near Brocken, the range's highest peak, near Wernigerode, Germany, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

A woman sits looking at the debris after an overnight fire gutted more than a dozen shanties on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

A protester dressed as Deadpool superhero, rides a toy unicorn during a demonstration demanding higher wages and supporting high school protest movement, in Lyon, France, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama (1) goes to the basket against Dallas Mavericks' Daniel Gafford (21) and Caleb Martin during the first half of an NBA basketball game, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Darren Abate)

Israeli settlers gather at an eight-house compound that settlers claim to have purchased on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Jericho in the occupied West Bank, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire at a destroyed warehouse after a Russian drone attack in Sofiivska Borshchahivka, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Danylo Antoniuk)

Mourners carry the coffin of CD Tenerife player Jesús de Miguel, who died Tuesday following a collision with Andorra goalkeeper Jesús Owono during a soccer match, during his funeral in Navahermosa, central Spain, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrea Comas)

FDNY and officials work the scene of a deadly fire on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, in the Sunset Park section of the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

A masked demonstrator prepares to throw a Molotov cocktail as police use a water cannon to disperse students protesting government policies on education, the cost of living and reduced sentences for people convicted of sexual offenses against minors, in Santiago, Chile, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Comedian and actor Russell Brand, accompanied by his wife Laura Brand, arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, where he has been convicted of rape and sexual assault charges on allegations dating back more than 20 years.(AP Photo/Thomas Krych)

Students chant slogans during a demonstration demanding increased education funding in Paris, France, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Anthropic is developing its artificial intelligence systems around twice as quickly as it was a year ago amid the CEO’s calls to slow down the technology’s pace of improvement, according to an analysis released Thursday by an independent monitoring group.

Anthropic invited researchers from the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit, Model Evaluation and Threat Research, to review its internal data and interview staff as it prepares for its Wall Street debut with debate swirling over the potential for AI models to elude human control with catastrophic consequences.

The findings are significant because details about the technology — and its risks — have been provided primarily by AI companies, which have been encouraged by President Donald Trump’s administration to police themselves on matters of safety.

It was during the research group’s assessment period that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the AI industry to slow its work so safety measures can catch up. In a Sept. 12 essay responding to mounting concerns about runaway AI, he urged the AI world to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

Anthropic did not immediately comment on the report in response to inquiries.

The San Francisco-based company is planning to go public later this month in what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever.

METR estimated that Anthropic is improving the capabilities of its models to do “well specified tasks” around twice as fast as it was a year earlier. The nonprofit’s researchers said they believed much of the reason for the faster development is the help of AI itself.

Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot increasingly is helping the company develop newer, more advanced versions of itself.

METR has conducted evaluations on model capabilities for Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs for years. The nonprofit is funded through donations and does not accept compensation for its work, but AI companies it has partnered with for evaluations have provided access and tokens, which METR uses for evaluations, research and engineering.

One of its two reports was based on analysis of Anthropic’s internal data provided by the company over a period of about 11 weeks, from mid-August through late October, as well as employee interviews.

METR said its assessment focused on two questions: whether the growth rate of Anthropic’s internal capabilities has accelerated and how much of that was attributable to AI. The group said it was given “unprecedented access to internal data” on Anthropic’s AI research and development process.

Anthropic’s redactions to the report limited how METR could communicate more detailed estimates of acceleration, and there were some internal disagreements and uncertainty among METR’s team, but the group said it believed the company’s rate of improvement had doubled.

“Anthropic appears to have made as much progress on benchmarks in the past year as they did between October 2023 and October 2025,” according to the METR report.

METR also reviewed both a public risk report Anthropic published in August and a private version, as well as other non-public data, and the organization said the public report “overall understates the level of acceleration that was occurring."

The report was peppered with caveats. METR said it could be overstating its findings, because the acceleration might only be limited to “well-specified tasks” that can be graded automatically or with a language model, instead of “messy” tasks that are harder to define. Or it could be that Anthropic understated its previous progress, making the latest number look bigger.

METR said it was able to “confidently” rule out the growth of computing power used in training AI models as the reason for the acceleration. Traditionally, the amount of computing power, known as compute, is directly related to how well an AI model performs. The researchers said their guess was that the improvement was down to using AI itself to improve AI.

A key concern, METR said, is that using AI to improve itself could start to compound the acceleration, which could be especially worrying given that researchers found there were no “bottlenecks” such as restrictions on computing power or data holding back Anthropic’s AI progress.

“We understand that AI is not yet able to make highly significant and fully autonomous contributions to the most important parts of the model training process,” the report said. However, Anthropic researchers described significant “signs of life” implying that could happen soon, METR said.

Amodei touched on this issue in his September essay, saying AI advances have been driven primarily by the concept of recursive self-improvement, or what he defined as “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.”

“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Amodei wrote.

In that same essay, Amodei championed the idea of having external evaluators embedded within the leading AI labs and specifically highlighted METR as an appropriate third-party evaluator. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the time that he also supported the idea of independent evaluators with employee-like access.

FILE - Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

FILE - Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York, Feb. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison, File)