Anthropic Onboards Six METR Evaluators With Employee-Like Access

PUBLISHER ARTICLE PREVIEW

From the original article

Anthropic announced on October 15, 2026 that it has started giving employee-like access to an embedded 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.

The announcement follows Anthropic’s commitment in September 2026 to stronger independent, third-party assessment of its models and safety practices, and its signing of the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, in which companies pledged to partner with independent external auditors or evaluators. Anthropic said it has worked with METR over the past year on several reviews of its Risk Reports.

Anthropic said the embedded team’s access to internal tools and systems is roughly on par with what its own risk assessment teams have. Outside a small number of clearly defined categories — data about customers, attorney-client-privileged information, and information about model architectures — Anthropic employees are encouraged to share information with the team just as they would with a fellow employee working on alignment risk.

A footnote in the announcement explains the architecture carve-out. Because evaluators, like bank examiners, may also work with other companies, Anthropic said it exercises caution around the possibility of inadvertent leaks: information about architectures presents a high risk of such leaks, and its relevance to risk assessment is typically low. When architecture information is highly relevant, Anthropic will generally seek to share it, though doing so will require explicit internal approvals.

Under the arrangement’s publication terms, METR will publish its analysis of Anthropic’s risk levels, incidents, or practices. Anthropic cannot veto publication, but it can require METR to redact information that falls into narrow, pre-defined categories. METR is free to characterize the redactions publicly and to say whether it believes they were justified, so long as it does not reveal the redacted information.

The engagement is limited to a small team operating under enforceable agreements, and other METR employees, including researchers who work with Anthropic on other projects, are siloed from the embedded team’s work. Anthropic described embedded evaluation as giving a few qualified people working under its security standards a close view of how it operates, and said it is not a way for other organizations to obtain its information, or that of its customers and partners.