Amodei's pacing essay commits Anthropic to giving METR desks, badges and company laptops

Dario Amodei (corroborated by The Verge and TechCrunch)·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Dario Amodei published 'We must pace the frontier' on 12 September 2026 (669 points on Hacker News). The one unilateral commitment with teeth is step 1: ongoing employee-like access for a team of embedded third-party evaluators, METR named explicitly, with desks in Anthropic's offices, access badges, company laptops, permissions mostly comparable to internal risk-assessment teams, and the right to publish findings on risk levels and incidents without Anthropic holding editorial control. Steps 2 and 3, industry capability checkpoints and four tiers of US-China agreement, carry no dates, thresholds or enforcement mechanisms.