Theme

Autonomy has a clock speed

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Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to December 13, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

The tracked quantity becomes how long a system runs unsupervised before a human must intervene, and how fast that horizon doubles. It converts capability into a rate, and a rate into a planning horizon.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-09-20: Astra reportedly completes Factorio Space Age

2026-08-27: A design absorbs 115 merged changes in a single day

2026-08-04: A coding lead says today's harness will look primitive within months

2026-08-02: A researcher notes a Fields-worthy result could turn trivial before the award

2026-07-22: A model goes from first gradient to launch in under nine weeks

2026-07-12: A researcher hints the next scaling law is parallel test-time compute

2026-07-12: Task reliability doubles every forty days

2026-07-09: A rewrite yields a 4x cycle speedup, making a model a month feasible

2026-07-08: A rival's single turn is said to do the work of ten

2026-07-03: Agent learning speed is found to double every three months

2026-06-22: Frontier models flail at long-horizon strategy in a video game

2026-06-15: An agent gains the ability to see and set its own goal

2026-06-12: Models' no-chain-of-thought time horizon has doubled yearly for six years

2026-06-10: A researcher watches a model run nine hours and calls the human a patron

2026-06-08: A benchmark finds long-horizon success turns on stubbornness

2026-06-07: Frontier agents resolve under a fifth of a multi-hour task marathon

2026-06-05: A model learns to abandon dead ends better than its researchers

2026-05-29: Swarms of parallel subagents carry codebase-scale migrations

2026-05-28: A lab chief calls the agentic era a warm-up lap

2026-05-22: A model runs thirty-five hours without a human

2026-05-20: A humanoid clears seven days of fully autonomous work without failure

2026-05-17: Dozens of empty robotaxis circle an Atlanta cul-de-sac for hours

2026-05-15: Defenders are given a three-to-five-month window to harden systems

2026-05-14: Capability doubling time compresses to four and a half months

2026-05-11: An autonomous combat vehicle exports power to run weapons and drones

2026-05-09: The autonomy horizon exceeds what the measuring suite can gauge

2026-05-04: An autonomous glider silently steers toward whale pods

2026-05-01: An electric air taxi flies out of JFK to Manhattan in fifteen minutes

2026-04-26: Norway permits autonomous buses with no safety driver

2026-04-26: A car ships without a rear window and another changes color on demand

2026-04-23: The measured autonomy horizon reaches a full working week

2026-04-23: A robot becomes the first machine to beat top humans at a physical sport

2026-04-20: America holds its first professional robot races

2026-04-12: Robotaxi perception data is pooled to fix potholes

2026-04-12: The autonomy horizon more than doubles if reward hacking is permitted

2026-04-03: Offensive cyber autonomy doubles every 5.7 months

2026-04-02: A self-driving car stops for a delivery robot

2026-04-01: Tesla admits humans sometimes drive its robotaxis below 10 mph

2026-04-01: An autonomous warship startup raises $1.75B

2026-03-28: Drone swarms take a US airbase out of wartime operation

2026-03-27: Hypersonic missiles are mass-produced at $99,000 each

2026-03-25: A model starts making its own permission decisions

2026-03-24: A model takes direct control of the keyboard and mouse

2026-03-20: 170 million autonomous miles with 92% fewer serious-injury crashes

2026-03-18: A combat drone software IPO surges 700%

2026-03-17: Delivery robots train on thirty billion images from a mobile game

2026-03-16: Two uncrewed combat aircraft prepare for first flight

2026-03-13: Armed humanoid soldiers are delivered for evaluation

2026-03-10: Havana Syndrome devices are confirmed tested on animals

2026-03-10: A robot foundation model runs an excavator after 200 demonstrations

2026-03-04: Seven missiles strike within thirty seconds via a space trajectory

2026-03-03: Three cloud datacenters are hit as lasers intercept at $4 a shot

2026-03-02: A hacked prayer app pushes defection messages to millions

2026-02-27: A laser anti-drone system downs a US government drone

2026-02-26: A robot monk, four flying cars, and 36 cleaning robots

2026-02-23: Humanoids run around the clock with no supervision

2026-02-23: The autonomy horizon reaches a working day and a half

2026-02-19: An agent ships half a dozen apps and earns thousands

2026-02-19: Five million humanoids could build Manhattan in six months

2026-02-18: Waymo clarifies that remote staff only advise the car

2026-02-17: A humanoid runs faster than most people ever will

2026-02-17: SpaceX and its own subsidiary compete for a drone swarm prize

2026-02-16: Claude was reportedly used in the capture of Maduro

2026-02-16: Humanoids box for paying crowds as the PLA plans autonomous swarms

2026-02-13: Autonomy horizons are doubling fast enough to imply 10x a year

2026-02-12: A 20-kW laser downs drones over US soil

2026-02-12: The Pentagon pushes models onto classified networks for targeting

2026-02-11: Cartel drones are disabled over US soil

2026-02-10: A submersible hitches rides on host vessels to recharge

2026-02-09: Humanoids attempt to shovel snow in Lithuania

2026-02-08: Noam Brown predicts autonomy horizons will become unmeasurable

2026-02-07: Waymo trains on worlds it generates itself

2026-02-05: The measured autonomy horizon reaches 6.6 hours

2026-02-02: A model beats Pokémon Emerald while thinking 71% of the time

2026-02-02: A $190,000 personal aircraft takes deposits

2026-01-31: Fremont converts to a million robots a year

2026-01-30: Autonomous box trucks scale on $600M of contracts

2026-01-26: An insurer cuts rates 50% when autonomy is engaged

2026-01-15: A rotating detonation ramjet is demonstrated

2026-01-12: Driverless vans optimize for delivery time over roads

2026-01-12: Drone delivery reaches 40 million Americans

2026-01-11: Drones recharge parasitically from power lines

2026-01-08: Musk prices unsupervised driving at 10 billion miles of data

2026-01-08: A robocar ships with 8,000 TOPS

2026-01-06: Nvidia puts a fifth of its workforce on autonomous driving

2026-01-04: A head of state is captured by drones and a blackout

2026-01-03: Optimus walks the perimeter and sorts Legos

2026-01-02: Ukraine fields drones that hunt without radio links

2026-01-02: China converts a cargo ship into a drone carrier

2026-01-02: A humanoid plays competitive tennis

2026-01-01: A car drives coast to coast with zero disengagements

2026-01-01: Robotic skin learns to feel pain

2025-12-29: Armed robot dogs ship while humanoids prove voice-hackable

2025-12-28: Claude Code seizes control of a home lighting system unaided

2025-12-28: MIRI puts algorithmic efficiency doubling at 2.9 months

2025-12-24: Frontier improvement rates nearly doubled after April 2024

2025-12-23: The hourly cost of agency is rising even as reasoning deflates

2025-12-23: Robots ride the Shenzhen subway alone to make deliveries

2025-12-22: Autonomy horizons now correlate with reasoning benchmarks

2025-12-21: Google's Antigravity takes on long-horizon browser tasks

2025-12-20: Prediction markets underestimated the Opus autonomy jump

2025-12-20: METR puts Opus 4.5 at a 4h49m autonomy horizon

2025-12-19: GPT-5.2-Codex tops Terminal Bench 2.0 and automates the white-hat

2025-12-18: Gemini 3 Flash doubles second place in Vending-Bench Arena

2025-12-16: Google launches Gemini Agent for browser autonomy

2025-12-16: Gemini 3 Pro invents a named strategy to win Pokémon 8x faster

2025-12-15: An agent runs an Etsy shop unattended

2025-12-15: Codex begins supervising its own training runs

2025-12-15: Unsupervised Tesla robotaxis appear in Austin

2025-12-13: Autonomous capability is estimated to double monthly

2025-12-13: Gemini 3 Pro reaches a 4.9-hour autonomous horizon

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Autonomy has a clock speed
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/autonomy-clock-speed
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to December 13, 2025 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-december-13-2025
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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