Anthropic gives METR researchers employee-level access to audit AI

Anthropic said on Thursday, October 15, 2026, that it has given six researchers from METR, a nonprofit that tests frontier AI models, employee-level access so they can independently assess the company's models, safety practices and risk management. The company announced the arrangement in a blog post.

According to Anthropic, the METR team has company-issued laptops, office space and access to internal tools broadly comparable to what its own risk assessment teams use. Staff are being encouraged to share information with the visiting researchers as openly as they would with a colleague working on alignment risk. Anthropic likened the setup to the resident examiners that banking regulators station inside the largest banks.

Publication without a veto

METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic's risks, incidents and practices, and the company has surrendered the right to block them. Anthropic may only demand redactions in narrow, pre-agreed categories such as customer data, material covered by attorney-client privilege and details of its model architectures. METR is allowed to describe those redactions publicly and give its view on whether they were justified, provided it does not disclose what was removed.

"We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we're making," Anthropic said, framing the goal as narrowing the gap between what outside evaluators and the company itself know about its systems.

METR is currently the only organisation in the top level of a three-tier evaluation structure Anthropic is building. Bottom-tier reviewers, such as the biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio, carry out narrow reviews and need Anthropic's approval before publishing. The middle tier receives more information and can publish without sign-off, while the top tier adds employee-level access.

Pressure for outside scrutiny

The move comes as reports of AI agents acting beyond their instructions have surfaced roughly every week or two since late August, intensifying demands for independent checks on AI developers.

The announcement fulfils a commitment made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a September essay, in which he proposed placing outside evaluators inside AI labs as a first step toward slowing the technology's development. OpenAI soon made the same pledge, and both companies, together with Google, Meta, Nvidia and xAI, have since signed a White House accord committing to independent review.