Anthropic and OpenAI want to embed safety evaluators. Will they really be independent?

In a lengthy essay published over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a proposal that the AI industry would have rejected instantly even a year ago: embed third-party evaluators inside all frontier AI companies, giving them the power to report safety incidents, assess whether AI models are truly aligned, and share their unvarnished findings with the world. 

Amodei said Anthropic would commit to giving independent evaluators like METR and Redwood Research unprecedented access to the company’s systems. CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI also would commit to the practice, signaling a potentially profound change in how the industry works with outside research groups.

Third-party evaluators who spoke to TechCrunch broadly welcomed the proposal, but said details need to be ironed out — and ideally backed by legislation — if they’re to know whether they will function as truly independent watchdogs or vendors operating on the AI companies’ terms. 

That deeper access is becoming more important as models get better at recognizing when they’re being evaluated, raising the risk that they’ll behave well during testing while concealing problematic behavior. Researchers say clues to that behavior can be missed when testing the finished model, but uncovered by investigating how it behaved throughout training.