Anthropic gives six METR researchers employee-level access

Anthropic has given six researchers from the nonprofit METR employee-level access to assess its AI models, safety practices and risk management, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

The researchers have Anthropic-issued laptops, office space and access to internal tools roughly on par with those used by the company’s risk assessment teams. Anthropic said employees are encouraged to share information with METR as they would with a colleague working on alignment risk.

METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents and practices. Anthropic cannot veto publication, but can require redactions for narrow, predefined categories, including customer data, attorney-client privileged material and information about model architectures. METR may publicly describe its redactions and say whether it considers them justified, provided it does not reveal the redacted information.

Anthropic compared the arrangement to regulators placing resident examiners inside large banks. METR is the only evaluator so far in the top tier of a three-tier system the company is developing. The middle tier can publish without approval, while bottom-tier evaluators, including biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio, need approval to publish.

The announcement follows a September essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposing that outside evaluators be embedded in AI labs. OpenAI also pledged to do so. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia and xAI have since signed a White House accord committing to independent review.