Anthropic Gives METR Employee-Like Access for Independent AI Evaluation
Anthropic says it has onboarded six METR staff with employee-like access to evaluate its models and safety practices, and that METR can publish risk assessments without an Anthropic veto, subject to narrow redactions.
By 1EyeAI Desk ·
Anthropic announced on Oct. 15, 2026 that it has started giving employee-like access to a team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models. Anthropic says six METR employees now have company hardware, office space, and access to internal tools and systems roughly on par with Anthropic’s own risk-assessment teams, with narrow exclusions such as customer data, attorney-client material, and most model-architecture details.
Anthropic says METR will publish analyses of risk levels, incidents, or practices. Anthropic cannot veto publication, it says, but can require redactions in pre-defined categories; METR may publicly characterize whether those redactions were justified without revealing the redacted material. Anthropic also describes a three-tier evaluator system: SecureBio is in the first tier (narrow reviews with Anthropic approval to publish), a second tier with broader access and no approval requirement except redactions, and METR in the third tier with the deepest access.
The company says it is also working with SecureBio and Accenture (including Faculty) and is in early talks with others, including Hugging Face. It frames the program as following last month’s White House Accord on Super Intelligence pledge to partner with independent evaluators.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Anthropic and OpenAI had sought significant control over what outside evaluators could publish; both companies disputed parts of that characterization when asked. Anthropic’s post today is its own account of the METR arrangement.
What this means for you: Nothing changes in Claude for everyday users today. If you follow AI safety policy, watch for METR’s published assessments. If you build on frontier models, expect more third-party scrutiny of labs’ safety claims—and treat lab statements about evaluator independence as claims until the published reports appear.