Anthropic has named Accenture as the first "embedded evaluator" under CEO Dario Amodei's "Pace the Frontier" plan. Each company will invest at least $1 billion over five years to build an in-house evaluation team that tests Anthropic's models from inside the company.

The unusual part is the access: instead of testing finished models from the outside, embedded evaluators get "access comparable to an employee's" — observing training runs, monitoring deployment decisions, red-teaming models, running alignment assessments and testing safeguards. Anthropic says this makes accountability "more verifiable" without reducing its own responsibility for model safety.

The choice raised eyebrows in the safety community: Accenture's Faculty unit is a commercial consultancy, not a nonprofit like METR, and more than 100 researchers — including Geoffrey Hinton — publicly demanded evaluator independence from commercial ties the same day. Anthropic says the deal is non-exclusive and more evaluators will be announced.