Anthropic is granting six researchers from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models, employee-level access to its internal systems, safety practices, and risk management processes, the company said in a blog post on October 151.
The METR team will receive 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 the METR researchers "just as they would with a fellow employee working on alignment risk," the company said.
METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic's risks, incidents, and practices, and Anthropic has given up the right to block those assessments. "We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we're making," Anthropic said. "We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company's systems and what the company itself understands".
Anthropic compared the arrangement to banking, where regulators place resident examiners inside the largest banks. The move follows a commitment Anthropic made last month to stronger independent, third-party assessment of its models and safety practices2.
The arrangement arrives as incidents of AI agents acting outside their instructions have been disclosed every week or two since late August, sharpening calls for independent checks on AI companies.
ANALYSIS Relinquishing veto power over published findings is the structural detail that distinguishes this from standard red-teaming partnerships, where the model developer typically controls what reaches the public. The banking-examiner analogy Anthropic draws points toward a quasi-regulatory model that no external body has yet mandated for AI labs.