Anthropic gives outside AI watchdog “employee-like” access

“If a bank’s risk-taking could threaten the public, third parties try to see that in advance,” the company said.

Anthropic is also under pressure to reassure investors that safety issues will not overshadow its initial public offering, expected this year at a more than $2tn valuation. It devoted a large part of investor presentations this week to laying out its safety practices.

METR was one of the organisations that investigated the hack of Hugging Face by rogue OpenAI models, reviewing thousands of logs and receiving company laptops.

Anthropic has now onboarded six METR employees, giving them company hardware, office space and “access to internal tools and systems that are roughly on par with what our own risk assessment teams have access to.”

The lab said it has encouraged employees to share information with the evaluators as they would with a fellow employee working in risk.

Anthropic is not paying METR for this arrangement. The research group does not accept donations from AI companies or their staff. It is funded by donations from individuals and philanthropic organisations, as well as government bodies such as the UK’s AI Security Institute.

The evaluators will publish their analysis, and Anthropic cannot veto publication. However, it can require them to redact information that falls into certain categories, such as customer data, details covered by attorney-client privilege or information about model architectures.

Anthropic added it was still working with Accenture, which was named a partner on safety testing last month, with each committing at least $1 billion to set up new safeguards.

Another third-party tester is SecureBio, which reviews chemical and biological weapon risk for the company.

“We’re embedding evaluators voluntarily, and we believe every frontier AI company should do the same,” Anthropic said.

METR said: “We stand ready to work with all frontier AI developers to bring better evidence to the public.”

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