Anthropic announced a partnership with Accenture to conduct independent evaluation of frontier AI, describing it as a step toward a commitment made in its CEO's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier" to embed evaluators within the company.
The effort will be led by Faculty, Accenture's specialist AI business. Its scope includes evaluating and red-teaming models, conducting alignment assessments, and testing model safeguards. According to Anthropic, Accenture's experience helping businesses and governments deploy AI across industries gives it insight into how enterprises use AI in practice, a perspective it will bring to evaluating Anthropic's models.
Both companies expect to invest at least $1 billion each in building capacity in this area over the next five years.
Anthropic notes that embedded evaluation is new and many operational details remain unsettled. Unlike today's external evaluators, embedded evaluators would work inside AI companies with access comparable to an employee's — allowing them to observe models during training, follow decisions about how models are built and deployed, and speak directly with staff. From that vantage point, the company says, they can assess how a company operates, verify safety commitments, identify blind spots, report incidents, and give the public a more informed account of benefits and risks.
The company stresses that independent embedded evaluators do not reduce its accountability but make it more verifiable, and that model safety remains its responsibility. It also points to the absence of standards for what information embedded evaluators should access or how they should report findings, and no settled funding system. Anthropic says long-term funding should come from pooled or government sources, as it called for in its Advanced AI Framework in June, but since neither exists today it will fund Accenture's work directly while in dialogue with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to pilot elements of embedded evaluation using their own funding.
The partnership is non-exclusive: Anthropic says it will work with other evaluators to be announced in the coming weeks, and Accenture will work with other AI developers in similar capacities. The company says it expects its approach to evolve and will share more as the work begins.