Six people, employee-level access
On October 15 Anthropic said six researchers from the nonprofit evaluator METR have been "onboarded": they have Anthropic-issued laptops and office space, and access to internal tools and systems roughly on par with Anthropic's own risk assessment teams. Anthropic also encourages employees to share information with them as they would with a colleague working on alignment risk.
Anthropic compares the setup to regulators placing resident examiners inside large banks. Only a small METR team is involved, bound by enforceable agreements and siloed from the rest of METR's staff.
Who decides: METR holds the right to publish
The key term is publication. METR will publish its own analysis of Anthropic's risk levels, incidents and practices. Anthropic cannot veto it and can only require redactions in three predefined categories: customer data, attorney-client privileged information and model architecture information. METR may publicly describe what kind of material was removed and whether it thinks the redactions were justified, without revealing the redacted content itself.
Three tiers of evaluators
Anthropic also laid out a tier system:
- Tier one: narrowly scoped risk investigations; Anthropic decides what access to give, and findings need Anthropic's approval to publish.
- Tier two: more information, and publication without approval, under the same redaction rules.
- Tier three: employee-like access; currently only METR.
SecureBio is reviewing the chemical and biological weapons chapter of Anthropic's August Risk Report; the embedded evaluation partnership with Accenture's Faculty that this site covered in September is still in progress; and talks with Hugging Face and other organizations are at an early stage.
What we can't see yet
The announcement gives no term for the arrangement and no date for METR's first report. Whether it works will only become clear once METR publishes a finding Anthropic would rather not see, along with its public assessment of the redactions.