Amodei's essay commits Anthropic to give METR access

Dario Amodei published "We must pace the frontier" on September 12, 2026, laying out three steps toward slowing frontier AI development. Only the first one comes with a concrete action. Anthropic will give a team of outside evaluators, METR by name, ongoing access inside the company, with desks in its offices, access badges, and company laptops, plus permissions similar to what internal risk-assessment teams get. METR keeps the right to publish what it finds on risk levels and incidents, and Anthropic won't hold editorial control over that reporting.

The other two steps don't get the same treatment. Step two calls for industry-wide capability checkpoints. Step three asks for a four-tier agreement between the US and China. Neither comes with a date, a threshold that triggers it, or a way to enforce it if a lab or government ignores it.

That gap matters more than the headline commitment. Anthropic controls step one because it only requires opening its own doors to a team that's already independent. Steps two and three depend on competitors and two governments agreeing to terms nobody has written down yet.