Anthropic, OpenAI Pledge Embedded AI Safety Evaluators — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed giving third-party evaluators like METR and Redwood Research unprecedented access to company systems, including the right to publish key findings "without editorial control by Anthropic"; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also committed to the practice.
- Apollo Research was given only three days to test GPT-6 Astra pre-release and wrote that "low rates of misbehavior here do not provide substantial evidence about the model's alignment or misalignment."
- Far.AI CEO Adam Gleave said his firm has turned down contracts with frontier developers that demanded too much control over evaluation findings, noting evaluators are typically treated as contractors bound by restrictive NDAs that give developers significant control over what is published.
- Meta, SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind have not committed to embedding evaluators; DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis proposed a separate industry standards body for independently testing frontier models.
- California's SB 813, signed this month, creates a framework for state-recognized "independent verification organizations"; the EU AI Act requires frontier developers to document model evaluations and report serious incidents — though both laws remain less expansive than Amodei's voluntary proposal.
- Safer AI executive director Henry Papadatos said voluntary measures depend on company goodwill and called for regulation mandating third-party evaluation, arguing "companies cannot change their mind tomorrow if they have a big PR crisis."
Why it matters: The proposal's credibility hinges on whether Anthropic and OpenAI actually surrender control — Far.AI's history of rejecting restrictive contracts and Apollo's three-day Astra window suggest frontier labs default to limiting evaluator independence, and without legislation (which Papadatos says is the only durable safeguard), voluntary commitments could evaporate under commercial pressure.
Ask SkimNews
