AI's low-profile safety gatekeepers are moving into the spotlight

Anthropic and OpenAI committed to embedding third-party evaluators internally, bringing small nonprofit evaluation organizations such as METR and Apollo Research to the center of AI safety governance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month proposed providing evaluators with office space, badge access, company laptops, and access roughly equivalent to that of the internal risk assessment team, and allowing them to publish key findings; OpenAI subsequently released its own plan. Funding and independence remain unresolved issues. METR said it received about $71 million in commitments over the past six months, up from $13.6 million for all of 2024, while Anthropic said long-term funding should come from joint or government channels. OpenAI fired three employees last week, two of whom said the reason was their communication style with third-party evaluators; OpenAI denied this claim. California Governor Newsom signed two bills involving independent verification organizations (IVOs), and at the federal level Trahan and Obernolte introduced the FRONTIER Act in July.