Anthropic Grants METR Employee-Level Access for Independent Safety Evaluation
On October 15, Anthropic officially announced it had granted "employee-level" deep access to 6 staff members of the nonprofit evaluation org METR to independently assess its models and safety practices. This follows through on last month's commitment to strengthen third-party evaluation and the White House superintelligence agreement.
Confirmed
- The METR team is embedded at Anthropic HQ with company hardware and badges, with access to internal tools and systems at roughly the same permission level as Anthropic's internal risk assessment team.
- A few categories are off-limits: customer data, attorney-client privileged information, and model architecture details.
- Anthropic encourages employees to interact with METR assessors as they would with colleagues.
- Anthropic has no veto over METR's conclusions, and METR will publish its risk assessment results publicly.
- Anthropic also published a blog post explaining how it works with third-party evaluators and said it is in talks with multiple organizations about similar arrangements.
Why it matters
- This is the first time an AI lab has embedded an independent organization internally with near-employee permissions for a safety review, significantly deepening the rigor and independence of third-party evaluation.
- The public-release, no-veto mechanism makes the findings more credible to the public and sets a transparency benchmark the industry can follow.
2026-10-16 ~ 2026-10-16 · 5 related posts
Primary sources
- [source] Anthropic grants METR employee-like access as independent safety evaluators go public — AnthropicAI · 2026-10-16
- Anthropic commits to third-party safety evaluations, grants METR employee-like access — patience_cave · 2026-10-16
- Anthropic grants METR employee-like access to independently evaluate its safety practices — thesaraharminta · 2026-10-16
- Anthropic embeds six METR evaluators with employee-level access, can't veto their findings — ns123abc · 2026-10-16
- [source] Anthropic details independent evaluator program: METR gets employee-like access, no veto — ns123abc · 2026-10-16