Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes artificial intelligence (AI) companies need the help of independent outside watchdogs to safeguard their developing technologies.But one of the organizations he believes could do the job, METR, is closely connected to the same AI safety community that has ties to Anthropic's start.Many of its leading figures have ties to a movement called "effective altruism (EA)" — the belief that evidence and careful reasoning can help maximize the good that companies and people can do with their time and resources.METR describes itself as an AI safety testing laboratory.ANTHROPIC CEO LIKENS AI FIGHT WITH CHINA TO COLD WAR, SEEKS 'DISARMAMENT NEGOTIATIONS'Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during the company's Builder Summit in Bengaluru, India, on Monday, Feb.
16, 2026.(Samyukta Lakshmi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)"METR evaluates frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and what risks they pose," its website reads.Although its website and public materials don’t make mention of effective altruism, its founders have used it as a framing for their work.Beth Barnes, METR’s founder and CEO, worked at OpenAI alongside Amodei as the company developed early versions of ChatGPT.At an Effective Altruism Global event, she laid out her vision for how to maintain AI safety."Our overall plan is — it sort of seems like it would be good if it was someone’s job to look at models and decide if they’re going to kill us, think through the ways that that might happen, anticipate them, figure out what the early warnings would be, that sort of thing," Barnes said.Similarly, Paul Christiano, who led the research around OpenAI’s efforts to ensure its models followed acceptable strategies for delivering requested results, later founded the first iteration of METR.
He too has framed parts of his approach to AI safety as a form of effective altruism."My suspicion is that it is more imp...