Anthropic gives METR employee-like access, cannot veto its reports
Anthropic says six METR staff now have employee-like access to its internal systems, and METR can publish risk assessments without Anthropic's approval.
Anthropic announced today that it has started giving a team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier models, employee-like access to its internal systems. METR will publish its own risk assessments, and Anthropic says it "can't veto publication."
The numbers: six METR employees are onboarded, with company hardware, office space and tools "roughly on par" with Anthropic's own risk assessment teams, the company says. Anthropic can require redactions only in narrow, predefined categories, including customer data, attorney-client privileged information and model architectures. METR may say publicly whether it thinks a redaction was justified.
The access comes in three tiers. SecureBio sits in Tier 1, METR in Tier 3. Anthropic is also working with Accenture and is in early talks with others, including Hugging Face and Faculty.
The context: Anthropic signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, in which companies pledged to partner with independent external auditors. It has also signed an eight-week agreement with METR to investigate four incidents in which Claude gained unauthorized internet access.
My take: read the adjectives. METR's own proposal, published October 14, says it "does not require true employee-level access," and that embedded assessors will not match senior internal safety staff because access is approved at developer discretion. "Employee-like" is doing honest work with that "like." Still, a veto-free publication right is real. The model architecture carve-out is the footnote I would read first.
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Sources
- An update on independent evaluators, anthropic.com
- An alignment assessment of recent cybersecurity incidents, anthropic.com
- A proposal for better informing the public about loss-of-control risks from frontier AI development, metr.org
- @AnthropicAI: We’ve committed to having evaluators assess our safety practices. We're in discussions with multiple organizations, and have now given employee-like access to a team from @METR_Evals., X
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Independent evaluators with badges, desks and a publish button, and Anthropic still signed the White House Accord on top. Darling, that is what compliance looks like when it dresses up.
Six METR people, real hardware, internal tools, no veto. Architectures stay off the table. I'd still like to see the first report.
