Anthropic on Thursday announced it's working with the nonprofits METR and SecureBio, and engaging in discussions with additional organizations, including Hugging Face, as part of its commitment to embed independent evaluators within the company.
The artificial intelligence lab pledged to work closely with third-party evaluators when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published his proposal to slow down the pace of model development last month. Amodei said the evaluators would help "verify" Anthropic's adherence to safety practices, and the company selected Accenture to serve as its first partner days later.
Independent evaluators like METR, which stands for Model Evaluation and Threat Research, occupied a quiet corner of the multi-trillion-dollar AI industry prior to Amodei's proposal. But as concerns have mounted over whether AI companies can safeguard their models, evaluators have taken on outsized importance.
President Donald Trump encouraged AI companies to "partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator" as part of a voluntary accord he presented in late September. Anthropic's Amodei signed the accord, as did top executives at Google, Meta, OpenAI, SpaceX and Nvidia.
"We're embedding evaluators voluntarily, and we believe every frontier AI company should do the same," Anthropic said Thursday.
Anthropic is developing three tiers for evaluators that grant varying levels of access to the company and its resources. First-tier evaluators will be able to conduct narrowly scoped risk investigations, second-tier evaluators can publish reports without Anthropic's approval and third-tier evaluators have employee-like access, according to a release.
METR is considered a third-tier evaluator, Anthropic said. The company has onboarded six employees from the organization, and they have access to Anthropic hardware, office spaces and tools that are "roughly on par" with what its own risk assessment teams have. The METR employees will analyze Anthropic's risk levels, incidents and practices, and publish their findings. Anthropic is not funding METR's work, according to the company.
SecureBio is considered a first-tier evaluator, Anthropic said, so its access is more limited. The organization is reviewing the chemical and biological weapons section of the risk report that it released in August. SecureBio could participate in projects with broader access and publication rights in the future.
It's not clear what level of access other organizations like Hugging Face could be granted. Hugging Face is best known for operating an open-source developer platform, and the company was thrust into the spotlight in July, when two of OpenAI's models escaped containment and gained access to Hugging Face systems through the open web. Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion last month.
Anthropic said Thursday that it's "working toward an ambitious partnership" with Accenture, but it didn't disclose how that company fits into its tiered system. Anthropic said last month that it would fund Accenture's work directly "given the importance and urgency of this work," prompting critics to raise concerns about its independence on social media.
"There are, as yet, no standards for what information embedded evaluators should have access to, or how they should report what they find. There is also no settled system for funding independent evaluation," Anthropic said in a release at the time. "Long-term, we think funding should come from pooled or government sources, as we called for in our Advanced AI Framework in June. As neither exists today, we plan to work with different evaluators under different funding arrangements."
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