The New York Post questions the close relationship between METR and Anthropic

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently advocated for third-party assessment organizations like METR to have long-term access to cutting-edge AI companies, gaining near-employee level permissions to inspect safety measures, incidents, and model training processes. However, an investigation by the New York Post found that the relationship between METR and the AI safety circle of Anthropic is much closer than typical external audits.

METR was originally called ARC Evals, incubated at the Alignment Research Center founded by Paul Christiano. Christiano previously worked with Amodei at OpenAI, and the New York Post reported that the two were also former roommates; he later became one of the initial five trustees of the Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust. The current technical staff member at METR, Ajeya Cotra, is Christiano's wife and previously managed AI safety funding at Coefficient Giving.

When METR evaluated Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta this year, there was no applicable conflict of interest policy in place, nor was there a formal avoidance process conducted. METR disclosed that among the employees and collaborators directly involved in the projects, at least six had close personal relationships with employees of the AI companies. METR stated that it does not accept funding from cutting-edge AI companies and their employees, nor does it charge for risk assessments; however, these companies provide a large number of model tokens for free.