Access for the METR team

On October 15, Anthropic said six employees of the nonprofit METR had begun working inside the company with what it calls access roughly comparable to its own risk-assessment teams. They received company hardware, office space and internal tools. Narrow categories remain excluded: customer data, attorney-client privileged material and, in most cases, details of model architectures.

METR may publish assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents and practices without company permission. Anthropic has no veto, but may require removal of information in predefined restricted categories. METR can publicly explain whether it considers such redactions justified.

Independence of the evaluation

A conventional external audit often sees a model and a prepared document set. This arrangement gives evaluators deeper visibility into training, safeguards and internal decisions while preserving organizational independence and publication rights. It moves oversight of frontier models closer to continuous supervision rather than a one-off inspection.

Anthropic also works with SecureBio and Accenture and describes three access levels for evaluators. The small METR team has received the broadest, third level.

Sources