AI Evaluator Forum urges independent oversight for AI safety evaluations

If you’re going to grade someone’s homework, you probably shouldn’t be sitting in their living room, eating their snacks, and hoping they don’t fire you. That’s essentially the argument more than 100 AI experts just made about the current state of AI safety evaluations. The AI Evaluator Forum published a public letter on September 18 calling for genuinely independent third-party evaluators at frontier AI companies. The letter lays out a set of core conditions that its signatories say are non-negotiable for credible safety testing: independence, editorial control, transparency, protection from retaliation, and full access to the systems being evaluated. What the letter actually says The AEF’s letter is a direct response to proposals floated by two of the most powerful people in AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both suggested a model where evaluators would be “nested” inside their companies, receiving “employee-like access” to test AI systems. On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, the AEF argues, it creates a structural conflict of interest that undermines the entire point of external evaluation. The distinction matters. Employee-like access is n...