METR Discloses Its Funders, from Audacious Project to Schmidt Sciences and Dylan Field
CFGeek · x · 2026-09-17
A METR team member shared the AI evaluation nonprofit's funding sources, noting colleagues have been deliberate about whose money they accept. Backers include The Audacious Project (its first institutional-scale funding), individuals from Jane Street, the Sijbrandij Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Schmidt Sciences, the Packard Foundation, and individuals like David Farhi, Geoff Ralston, Dylan Field and Steve Newman.
METR evaluates frontier models' autonomous capabilities and catastrophic risks: it found the task length AI agents can complete doubles roughly every 7 months, assessed GPT-5.1-Codex-Max as posing no significant catastrophic risk via self-improvement or rogue replication, and ran an RCT showing experienced open-source developers systematically overestimate AI tools' productivity benefits. It also prototyped Responsible Scaling Policies, now adopted by nine AI developers.
Related event: METR Discloses Funders and Conflict of Interest Policy(2 posts)→
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