Anthropic is giving employee-level access to six researchers from METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, to independently assess Anthropic’s models, safety practices, and risk management, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The arrangement comes at a time where incidents of AI agents acting outside their instructions have been disclosed every week or two since late August. The incidents have sharpened calls for independent checks on AI companies.
Anthropic compared the arrangement to banking, similar to how regulators place resident examiners inside the largest banks. METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents, and practices, and the company has given up the right to block them. METR is the only evaluator so far at the top of a three-tier system Anthropic is building.
Evaluators in the bottom tier, like biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio, run narrow reviews and require Anthropic’s approval to publish. The middle tier gets more information and can publish without approval, while the top tier adds METR’s employee-level access. Thursday’s announcement makes good on a promise Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made in a September essay, where he proposed embedding outside evaluators inside AI labs as a first step toward slowing the technology’s development.
OpenAI quickly pledged the same, and both companies, along with Google, Meta, Nvidia and xAI, have since signed a White House accord committing to independent review.
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