Anthropic Gives METR Researchers Employee-Level Access

AI company Anthropic announced on Thursday that six researchers from METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, will receive employee-level access so they can independently assess Anthropic's models, safety practices and risk management. The move comes as incidents of AI agents acting outside their instructions have been disclosed every week or two since late August, which has sharpened calls for independent checks on AI companies.

What the METR team receives

The METR researchers get company-issued laptops, office space and access to internal tools roughly on par with those used by Anthropic's own risk assessment teams. Employees are encouraged to share information with them as they would with a colleague working on alignment risk. Anthropic compared the setup to banking, where regulators station resident examiners inside the largest banks.

Publication and limits

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 may require redactions only in narrow, pre-defined categories: customer data, attorney-client privileged material and information about its model architectures. METR may publicly describe the redactions and say whether it considers them justified, provided it does not reveal the redacted content.

A three-tier system

Anthropic is building a three-tier system, and METR is so far the only evaluator in the top tier. Bottom-tier evaluators, such as the biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio, carry out narrow reviews and need Anthropic's approval to publish. The middle tier receives more information and can publish without approval, while the top tier adds employee-level access.

Earlier pledge

The announcement fulfils a promise made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a September essay, in which he proposed embedding outside evaluators inside AI labs as a first step toward slowing the technology's development. OpenAI quickly made the same pledge, and both companies, together with Google, Meta, Nvidia and xAI, have since signed a White House accord committing to independent review.