METR lands TED Audacious Project funding, refuses money from frontier AI labs
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-09-17
- METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) has received funding from TED's philanthropy arm, The Audacious Project, as announced by founder Benjamin Todd.
- METR evaluates frontier AI models for autonomous capabilities and catastrophic risks. Key work: agent task-completion horizons doubling every 7 months, a GPT-5.1-Codex-Max evaluation finding no significant catastrophic self-improvement/rogue-replication risk, and an RCT showing experienced open-source developers systematically overestimate AI productivity gains.
- METR prototyped the Responsible Scaling Policies approach now adopted by nine AI developers, and notably refuses donations from frontier AI companies and their employees.
Related event: AI Safety Evaluator METR Discloses Funders and Conflict-of-Interest Policy(3 posts)→
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