SE Gyges

> Each frontier AI company commits to giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes. This is the key step for verifiability of any pacing commitments, and has precedent in the banking industry, which sometimes involves regulatory “supervisors” embedded along with employees. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now. We intend this to be part of a broader push to redouble efforts on our safety and alignment work. — Dario Amodei, “We Must Pace the Frontier”, September 2026. METR is not capable of being a meaningful check on Anthropic. METR is not meaningfully independent, is not sufficiently staffed, and has no authority over Anthropic that cannot be revoked at Anthropic's discretion. Suggesting that embedding METR into Anthropic would be a meaningful check on Anthropic is so suspicious that it looks like an attempt to evade oversight and to sabotage attempts at oversight in general. If Dario does not really mean to suggest that METR could be expected to meaningfully check Anthropic, or he actually believes that METR could check Anthropic in the same way a government regulator can check a bank, something has gone badly wrong in formulating and communicating this policy. Why METR Cannot Check Anthropic You don't have to take my word that they're closely tied to Anthropic, you can take METR's: > Also note that some METR staff have strong social ties to employees of AI companies, and METR currently works out of a shared research center (Constellation) which hosts some AI lab staff. [1] I appreciate METR's professionalism and candor, both in general and in this report, because those are not always easy to find. I do think that this somewhat understates the problem: If you required METR employees who dealt with Anthrop