Anthropic gives a METR team employee-like access and lets it publish risk findings without a veto

Anthropic said on 15 October that it has started giving employee-like access to a team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models. Six METR employees have been onboarded with company hardware, office space and access to internal tools and systems that Anthropic says are roughly on par with what its own risk assessment teams have. METR will publish its analysis of Anthropic's risk levels, incidents or practices; Anthropic says it cannot veto publication, but it can require redactions in predefined categories such as customer data, attorney-client privileged information and model architecture, and it decides what falls into those categories. Anthropic describes three tiers of evaluator access, with METR in the highest tier, and says it is also working with SecureBio, Accenture and Faculty and is in early discussions with other organisations, including Hugging Face. Anthropic notes that it signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, in which companies pledged to partner with independent external auditors or evaluators. The post was updated on 16 October to clarify METR's current project terms.

What it means for business: this is a voluntary, company-described arrangement rather than a legal requirement; organisations relying on frontier models may want to watch for METR's published assessments as an extra, independent input to vendor risk reviews.