Anthropic is letting METR researchers look under the hood with employee-level access

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.

“We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we’re making,” Anthropic said in the blog post. “We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company’s systems and what the company itself understands.”

Under the new arrangement, the METR team has Anthropic-issued company laptops, office space, and access to internal tools roughly on par with what Anthropic’s own risk assessment teams use. “Anthropic employees are encouraged to share information with them just as they would with a fellow employee working on alignment risk” the company said.

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.

“Anthropic can’t veto publication, but we can require them to redact information if it falls into narrow, pre-defined categories,” the company said, such as customer data, anything attorney-client privileged, or relating to information about its model architectures. “METR is free to characterize our redactions publicly, and say whether it believes the redactions were justified, as long as it does so without revealing the redacted information” Anthropic added.

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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Aditya Mehta is a reporter at TechCrunch covering AI. He’s supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and attended UC Berkeley. You can contact from Aditya by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at adymehta.74 on Signal.