Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control.
METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems.
A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security and humanity at large.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei achieved a rare moment of unity with arch-rivals Sam Altman and Elon Musk in September when the OpenAI and SpaceX bosses rallied behind his proposal to embed external auditors in the leading labs.
Thursday’s announcement marks the first step to implementing these pledges. OpenAI has yet to lay out plans to bring in evaluators after Altman said Amodei’s proposals were a good idea.
“As models have become more powerful, they’ve required stronger safeguards and more challenging risk assessment,” Anthropic said on Thursday. “We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we’re making. But we can’t publicly share all the information relevant to our safety work.”
Critics of Anthropic’s proposal to use evaluators have argued the arrangements could lead to conflicts of interest, pointing to issues in the accounting sector, and that greater government regulation is required.
Anthropic argued that sharing information publicly could benefit malicious actors or competitors and added that its evaluators will operate similarly to bank supervision, whereby regulators assign resident examiners to work inside the largest banks.