Dario Amodei argued that AI firms should grant third-party evaluators deep access to internal systems to prevent advanced models from causing existential harm. The Anthropic CEO’s essay "We Must Pace the Frontier" proposes that the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research provide these embedded safety experts, with salaries for the roles topping $687,000. These researchers would maintain employee like access to oversee safety efforts and ensure models do not wipe out humanity.

Critics describe the proposal as a "complete joke" due to ties between the nonprofit and Anthropic’s early backers. METR receives funding from investors Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn and maintains links to Effective Altruism, a network that once included former Anthropic investor Sam Bankman-Fried. A METR official acknowledged the group has overlap with that movement, and one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust is linked to the nonprofit.