> LLMs show no sign of improving intelligence and instead providers are going down the ‘agentic’ rabbit hole.

I'm not sure where you're getting this. I don't work at Anthropic but Fable (Mythos) seems demonstrably smarter than Opus for pretty much any definition of smarter and they claim that Opus was used heavily in Mythos development (yeah I know take this with a massive pinch of salt).

Either way if the models are indeed helping development, even on the engineering, you can iterate on models faster and even if they're not contributing to core research yet you still have a baby exponential by improving the engineering.

Anthropic's claims about their own products have almost zero value as evidence. They have lied to our faces about stuff before, and will again if it drives the hype cycle which delivers them money.