Anthropic opens internal access to METR, allowing it to audit models and safety practices

Anthropic announced it is opening internal access to a team from the nonprofit METR, allowing them to review its AI models and safety practices. Six METR employees will receive company hardware, office space, and internal tools, with Anthropic saying their access is roughly equivalent to its own risk team; customer data, information protected by attorney-client privilege, and model architecture details remain off-limits. METR will independently publish its review results, and Anthropic can request redactions within preset categories, but METR can publicly state whether those redactions are reasonable. Anthropic says not all safety-related information can be made public, possibly because it could help attackers or involve commercial sensitivity. This arrangement is broader than the access Anthropic has given other external reviewers; SecureBio, Accenture, and Faculty previously received less access, and Anthropic has also begun preliminary discussions with Hugging Face.