The Most Important AI News This Week Is Getting Overlooked

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

We got a lot of notable model releases this week. Muse jumped back to the frontier with Wonder and Wonderful, Google actually released Gemini 4 Argon, and yet it seems like the two little unassuming models that were announced on Thursday, that are the subject of today's show, the ones that are getting the least fanfare of all of these might actually be the most significant, at least when it comes to the practical reality of using AI inside businesses.

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Anthropic has begun the process of embedding third-party safety evaluators into their organization. Last month, as part of calls to pace the frontier, Dario Amadei pledged to integrate third-party evaluators into Anthropic, giving them staff-level access to monitor safety procedures and reports on incidents. In an update published on Thursday, Anthropic said that they've now integrated the first batch, which is of course a six-person team from Meta. They said the Meta folks have employee-like access, which is their term, including use of company computers, office space and use of internal tooling. Anthropic added that they're working with SecureBio and Accenture as evaluators and are having early discussions with other organizations, including Hugging Face. Explaining why they support this model of safety monitoring, Anthropic wrote, We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we're making, but we can't publicly share all the information relevant to our safety work. Some of it could be useful to malicious actors or is commercially sensitive like computer training information. Instead, we're giving third-party evaluators deep access to our information and are having them share evidence and reasoned conclusions about the risks involved in building our models. We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company's systems and what the company itself understands.

Now, as this safety regime gets rolled out, there are two big areas of discussion and frankly criticism that are worth understanding. The first is the independence of the outside safety evaluators. Unlike what some have said, Anthropic claims they do not fund Meta, and frankly the web of connections is a bit beyond the scope of this particular headlines to unpack. However, Meta does share major backers with Anthropic who are aligned around the effect of altruism space. It's not necessarily full tinfoil hat, it's just that they come from the same philosophical roots and end up having a lot of the same funders because of that. Now, there are a range of valid opinions that could be held about the arrangement, but it's context for why Anthropic is quickly moving forward with that particular partnership while OpenAI appears a little more hesitant. The other big issue is how much control the labs have over the publication of safety audits. Earlier this week, Reuters published a report claiming that both Anthropic and OpenAI were seeking strict editorial control over reports. This seemed to be a fluid negotiation at the time of reporting, and the parties seemed to be moving toward a compromise that involved redacting confidential information and noting when major redactions had occurred. With Meta, Anthropic wrote that they, quote, can't veto publication, but we can require them to redact information if it falls into narrow, predefined categories. Meta is free to characterize our redactions publicly and say whether it believes the redactions were justified as long as it does so without revealing the redacted information. The categories mentioned were data about customers, legally privileged information, and information about model architectures. Anthropic has also defined three tiers for embedded auditors, with Meta the only one in the top tier, defined by employee-level access. SecureBio is currently in the bottom tier as they begin initial work reviewing existing chemical and biological weapons risk already publicly disclosed in Anthropic's August Risk Report. In that tier, Anthropic requires auditors to seek approval before publishing. Anthropic said that they will evaluate monitoring SecureBio to the second tier, which would get them more access to information and no approval required following the completion of their first report. Accenture has not begun work, but Anthropic says they are aiming to develop a partnership with them that involves red teaming models, guardrail testing, and alignment assessments.