AI safety spat: Heidy Khlaaf calls METR an unscientific shill, Joshua Saxe leaps to its defense
Turn_Trout · x · 2026-09-14
An open fight broke out in AI safety circles. Security researcher Heidy Khlaaf accused Anthropic of regulatory capture via METR, a 'voluntary' third-party auditor she says is ideologically and financially tied to it and audits through unscientific means like CoT, cherry-picking evidence to reinforce an AGI narrative.
Former Anthropic engineering head Joshua Saxe pushed back: METR is among the only nonprofit centers of AI safety excellence in the US and the world, staff gave up 'generational wealth' to work there, and it has published rigorous papers. Security people should join and add value rather than vilify it — more self-inflicted wounds won't help. The exchange highlights deep rifts over auditor independence and AI regulation paths.
More from Safety
- Sanders proposes 20-year prison term for developers advancing superintelligence — Kyrannio · 2026-09-14
- Activist dressed as Doctor Doom crashes Seattle council to protest surveillance camera expansion — jonerp · 2026-09-14
- Stolen METR API key burned ~$600,000 in credits over three weeks; critics mock the AI-safety eval org — AlexTensor · 2026-09-14
- Epoch AI researcher maps the levers for pacing AI: RSI speed limits, compute caps, agent budgets — connoraxiotes · 2026-09-14
- Altman, Amodei, Hassabis and Musk agree to 'pace the frontier' as AI safety funding and hiring surge — Astral Codex Ten · 2026-09-14
- The Decompilation Book: a free tutorial series teaching how decompilers work, built around tiny-dec — blaizedsouza · 2026-09-14