// ZDNET — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Anthropic gives third-party auditors ’employee-like access’ in AI industry first
As AI labs continue to self-regulate, external evaluators play a crucial role in spotting risks.
On Thursday, Anthropic announced that it will “give employee-like access” to six evaluators from METR, a third-party nonprofit that tests frontier models.
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The employees have been given Anthropic hardware and office space, and can access “internal tools and systems that are roughly on par with what our own risk assessment teams have access to,” Anthropic said. “Outside a small number of clearly defined categories (e.g., data about customers, attorney-client privileged information, or information about our model architectures), Anthropic employees are encouraged to share information with them just as they would with a fellow employee working on alignment risk.”
METR will publish its findings, none of which Anthropic is allowed to withhold, but the company will ask METR to redact sensitive information where necessary.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed embedding evaluators from nonprofits like METR in a September blog post, one of three suggestions for “pacing the frontier.”
In the announcement, Anthropic said that it wants to be accountable, but “can’t publicly share all the information relevant to our safety work,” because “some of it could be useful to malicious actors, or is commercially sensitive, like compute or training information.” That’s where METR will come in: Anthropic will give them “deep access” to models and company information, and METR will share its conclusions about the risks those models pose.
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“We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company’s systems and what the company itself understands,” Anthropic added.
The company explicitly noted that researchers like METR are valuable to the review process because they don’t “hold equity in the company they’re evaluating, or be financially or operationally dependent on it.”