Anthropic said it is partnering with Accenture to have outside evaluators work inside the artificial intelligence company, a step towards fulfilling a pledge by chief executive Dario Amodei to have independent observers evaluate its most powerful models. The partnership will be led by Faculty, Accenture’s specialist AI business, and its work will include evaluating and “red-teaming” Anthropic’s models, the company said on Sept 18. Anthropic and Accenture each expect to invest at least US$1 billion (S$1.28 billion) over the next five years for the effort. The pledge was made in a Sept 12 essay in which Amodei argued that AI companies must slow the pace at which they improve their models’ capabilities. Anthropic said it will fund Accenture’s work directly, but that in the long term, “funding should come from pooled or government sources”. Anthropic said it is in talks with Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), a California-based non-profit organisation, to participate in elements of embedded evaluation using METR’s own funding. Critics, including David Sacks, a former White House AI adviser, have questioned METR’s independence because of its ties to Anthropic’s investors and staff. METR says it takes no funding from AI companies or their executives. On Sept 18, more than 100 AI researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, signed a public letter calling for evaluators embedded in AI companies to