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Anthropic on Friday announced it has selected Accenture as an embedded evaluator, the company's first concrete step toward implementing CEO Dario Amodei's proposal to slow down the pace of artificial intelligence development. Both Anthropic and Accenture have agreed to invest at least $1 billion to "building capacity in this area" over the next five years, according to a release. But Anthropic said that given the "importance and urgency," it will fund Accenture's work directly. "Long-term, we think funding should come from pooled or government sources, as we called for in our Advanced AI Framework in June," Anthropic said. "As neither exists today, we plan to work with different evaluators under different funding arrangements." On Saturday, Amodei rocked the tech sector by publishing a three-step plan to temper how quickly AI companies improve their most advanced models. Anthropic and its chief rival, OpenAI, have been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks after a growing chorus of researchers warned about the potential for AI to cause catastrophic harm. Amodei's proposal was cheered by some industry executives this week, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, but others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, brushed off concerns and argued that there's no need for new regulation. Many questioned what Amodei's proposal would mean in practice, especially as Anthropic gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO. The first step of Amodei's plan grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. He said Saturday that Anthropic "unilaterally" committed to this part of the proposal, and he encouraged other AI companies to do the same. Anthropic said Friday that it has initially agreed to embed employees from Faculty, Accenture's specialist AI business, into the company in order to test safeguards, red-team models and assess whether models behave in line with human values. The partnership is not exclusive, and Anthropic said it is in discussions with the research nonprofit METR, as well as other third parties. The company emphasized that it is still responsible for the safety of its models, and said that working with embedded evaluators will not reduce its accountability. "We're sharing these early efforts now so people and other AI developers can see our process," Anthropic said. "We expect our approach to evolve as the field matures, and we'll share more as our work begins and as we bring on additional evaluators."
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