“If a bank’s risk-taking could threaten the public, third parties try to foresee this,” the company said.
Anthropic is also under pressure to reassure investors that security issues will not overshadow its initial public offering, expected this year at a valuation of more than $2tn. It devoted a large portion of investor presentations this week to laying out its security practices.
METR was one of the organizations that investigated Hugging Face’s hack of smart OpenAI models, examining thousands of logs and receiving corporate laptops.
Anthropic has now joined six METR employees, giving them company hardware, office space and “access to internal tools and systems roughly comparable to what our own risk assessment teams have access to.”
The lab said it encouraged employees to share information with the evaluators, just as they would with a fellow worker at risk.
Anthropic does not pay METR for this arrangement. The research group does not accept donations from AI companies or their employees. It is funded by donations from individuals and philanthropic organizations, as well as government bodies such as the UK’s AI Security Institute.
The evaluators publish their analysis, and Anthropic cannot veto the publication. However, it may require them to redact information that falls into certain categories, such as client data, details covered by attorney-client privilege or information about model architectures.
Anthropic added that it is still working with Accenture, which was named a partner in the security test last month, with each committing at least $1 billion to set up new security measures.
Another third-party tester is SecureBio, which assesses chemical and biological weapons risk for the company.
“We employ evaluators voluntarily, and we believe every Frontier AI company should do the same,” Anthropic said.
METR said: “We are ready to work with all Frontier AI developers to bring better evidence to the public.”
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