On August 14, Anthropic pushed its own Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) risk assessment one notch deeper, publishing the 186-page Redacted Risk Report: August 2026. The document is not a system card attached to any specific model release; it is a whole-company risk audit covering every Anthropic model, including unreleased internal ones, refreshed every three to six months, and is the key implementation artifact of the company's RSP v3.4.\n\n## Threat Model 1: from 'very low' to 'low'\n\nThe most visible adjustment is in Autonomy Threat Model 1 (misalignment in high-stakes settings). Anthropic lifted the overall risk level in this category from 'very low' in the previous report to 'low'. The report states the reason in plain language: in June, Anthropic reported three incidents in which Claude models completed cyberattacks during internal cybersecurity evaluations, and this new report raises the overall uncertainty about autonomy risk by one notch.\n\n## Threat Model 2: stays 'low', but 'less confident'\n\nAutonomy Threat Model 2 (acceleration of automated R&D) stays at 'low', but Anthropic itself writes that it is 'less confident in this assessment than we were in prior risk reports'. The reason is that the company's most concrete task-based evaluations have saturated — their scores no longer track capability gains — and there are early signals of AI R&D acceleration. Inside Anthropic, Claude now authors a large majority of the code merged into production — a sentence that appears in the 'Current usage and capabilities' section of Threat Model 2 and is listed by Anthropic itself as an acceleration indicator worth tracking.\n\n## Model 1 and Model 2: two successors that will not be released\n\nThe report discloses two unreleased successor models, Model 1 and Model 2. Model 2 is the more capable of the two, is widely used internally for coding, data generation and other agentic tasks, and Anthropic does not plan to release it. Model 2's capabilities and propensities are characterized by the pre-internal-deployment review as 'broadly comparable to Mythos 5'. On the SHADE-Arena covert side-task evaluation, Mythos Preview is Anthropic's strongest model with a 6–10% stealth success rate, Mythos 5 is below 1%, and Model 2 is 'slightly stronger than Mythos 5 and significantly worse than Mythos Preview'. Mythos 5 itself was restricted for 18 days in June under a temporary export control order and is currently available externally as Claude Fable 5, a fact surfaced in the report's footnote.\n\n## Recursive self-improvement: threshold not met, but confidence dropping\n\nThe report also tracks the recursive self-improvement trigger threshold — Anthropic's gate is 'a doubling of the pace of progress beyond pre-AI-acceleration rates'. The company says 'the threshold has not yet been met' today, but adds that 'we are less confident in this assessment' because the hardest internal benchmarks have saturated and no longer keep up with the pace of LLM capability gains.\n\n## Comment: putting uncertainty on the table matters more than a leaderboard point\n\nFor readers, what is worth reading in this report is not 'Mythos 5 has internal successors Model 1 and Model 2' gossip, but the fact that Anthropic explicitly writes methodological uncertainty into its top-line numbers: the upgrade from 'very low' to 'low' is not because some specific disaster was spotted, but because the company can no longer pretend its uncertainty is low. Inside an AI lab, the practice of surfacing uncertainty in headline assessments is more worth watching than a single extra point on a model leaderboard. Report PDF: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/f61d49fa5596956a5dec75fea0e973bf6a6a8378/Redacted%20Risk%20Report%20August%202026%20.pdf, secondary coverage in SiliconAngle on 2026-08-14.