Anthropic gives outside AI safety evaluators METR and SecureBio inside access

Anthropic is letting outside safety researchers into the building. Literally. On October 15, 2026, the AI developer expanded its work with independent evaluators. Under the expansion, a six-member team from the nonprofit METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) receives what amounts to employee-like access to the company’s hardware, office space and internal systems. The biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio and Accenture’s Faculty unit also hold defined roles in a new three-tier evaluator framework. The interesting part is not the badge access. It is the publishing rights. METR can disclose what it finds without asking Anthropic for permission first. For a company building frontier AI models, that is a notable amount of rope to hand an outside group. How the three tiers work SecureBio operates at tier one. The nonprofit is currently reviewing Anthropic’s August 2026 risk report. It is focusing specifically on the section covering chemical and biological weapons. This is not SecureBio’s first pass at Anthropic’s homework. It previously evaluated the company’s February 2026 risk report. In that earlier assessment, SecureBio judged the risks tied to the Claude Opus 4.6 model as “very lo...