Anthropic and OpenAI need truly independent safety evaluators, experts say in public letter

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, April 30, 2026.

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Over 100 artificial intelligence experts and evaluators are banding together to warn they won't have the necessary resources and protections to test the safety of AI technology, which is facing heightened scrutiny due to concerns from insiders about the potential dangers of frontier models.

"We're just trying to really demonstrate a shared common ground on basic principles and ensure that independent oversight can be a meaningful tool for managing AI risk broadly," said Conrad Stosz, chair of the AI Evaluator Forum consortium that organized the letter, in an interview.

The group published a public letter on the matter on Friday, and shared it exclusively with CNBC. The signatories include AI luminaries like Geoffrey Hinton and members of organizations such as Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University and the nonprofit evaluator METR. They want to compel foundation model providers to ensure that third-party AI evaluators are allowed the necessary "scientific objectivity, transparency, independence, and robust protections" to do their jobs effectively and credibly, the letter said.

Stosz said it's part of an effort to hold the foundation model companies accountable to their recent pledges to support more thorough third-party AI safety testing.

Stosz said that the coalition doesn't "advocate for one particular way" to ensure that AI models are developed safely, but wants to ensure that "basic principles" and "greater standardization" are at least established for evaluators and others who work independently of the major labs.

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"There's a very small number of groups that are actually sufficiently technically credible and have the scale and the ability" to perform the kind of work, he said.

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