Anthropic announced Friday it selected Accenture as an embedded evaluator, its first concrete step toward implementing CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal to slow AI development. Both companies agreed to invest at least $1 billion to “building capacity in this area” over the next five years, though Anthropic said it will fund Accenture’s work directly given the “importance and urgency,” adding that long-term funding should come from pooled or government sources as called for in its Advanced AI Framework in June. Amodei published a three-step plan on Saturday to temper how quickly AI companies improve their most advanced models; the first step grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents, which he said Anthropic “unilaterally” committed to. Anthropic said it initially agreed to embed employees from Faculty, Accenture’s specialist AI business, to test safeguards, red-team models and assess whether models behave in line with human values. The partnership is not exclusive, and Anthropic said it is in discussions with the research nonprofit METR and other third parties, emphasizing it remains responsible for its models’ safety and that embedded evaluators will not reduce its accountability.