Anthropic gives METR employee-like access for safety evaluation

Anthropic said the METR team’s access to its internal tools and systems is roughly comparable to access available to Anthropic’s risk assessment teams.[1] Anthropic also said employees are encouraged to share information with METR as they would with a colleague working on alignment risk.[1]

Anthropic said METR may publish analyses of its risk levels, incidents and practices without requiring Anthropic’s approval.[1] Anthropic may nevertheless require METR to redact information in predefined categories, including customer data, attorney-client privileged information and model architecture information.[1] Anthropic said it ultimately decides whether information belongs in those categories.[1] The terms therefore allow publication while leaving Anthropic a defined role in restricting specific content.

Anthropic said it is developing a three-tier system for evaluator access and hopes to have several evaluators at its highest tier over time.[1] In its description, first-tier evaluators conduct narrowly scoped investigations and need Anthropic’s approval to publish; second-tier evaluators receive more information and may publish without approval, although Anthropic can still require specific information to be removed.[1] Anthropic said METR’s employee-like access and publication rights put this engagement in the third tier.[1] The tier description offers a framework for comparing access and publication terms, but Anthropic did not say that several evaluators already operate at the highest tier.

Anthropic said it had worked with METR over the previous year on several reviews of its Risk Reports.[1] It also said SecureBio was reviewing the chemical and biological weapons chapter of its August Risk Report after publishing a pilot review of an earlier report.[1] Anthropic described work toward a partnership with Accenture and Faculty covering model evaluation and red-teaming, alignment assessments, safeguard testing and capability-building, and said discussions with several other organizations, including Hugging Face, were at an early stage.[1] METR says voluntary company engagements leave it dependent on companies for participation, access and permission to publish.[2]