METR Raises $71M to Independently Stress-Test the World's Most Powerful AI
METR raises $71M in six months to scale independent AI safety evaluations as rogue deployment risks grow more real
- $71M raised: METR secured ~$71M in commitments over six months from philanthropic foundations and individuals, not AI companies.
- Rogue deployment risk confirmed: METR's Frontier Risk Report found current AI agents plausibly have the means to start small unauthorized autonomous deployments inside AI labs.
- Expanding research agenda: Funds will go toward tracking recursive self-improvement, evaluating AI monitoring systems, and investigating real-world AI incidents.
- AI task horizons doubling every 7 months: METR's benchmark research shows the length of tasks AI can complete autonomously has doubled roughly every 7 months for 6 years.
- Hard independence rule: METR refuses funding from frontier AI companies and bans donations directed by their staff, a structural safeguard as its risk assessments grow more consequential.
- Hiring aggressively: METR is significantly expanding its team; open roles available at metr.org/careers.
METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), the nonprofit that acts as a kind of independent safety inspector for the most powerful AI systems in the world, just announced it has raised commitments of around $71 million in the last six months. The funding comes from a broad coalition of philanthropic institutions and individuals, and arrives at a moment when the questions METR is trying to answer are becoming harder, more urgent, and more consequential than ever.
Who is METR, and why does it matter?
METR is a nonprofit research institute based in Berkeley, California, that evaluates frontier AI models' capabilities to carry out long-horizon, agentic tasks that some researchers argue could pose catastrophic risks to society. Founded by Beth Barnes, a researcher who previously worked at DeepMind and OpenAI, METR occupies a rare and structurally important position: it is one of the only organizations doing rigorous, independent capability evaluations of the most powerful AI models before they ship.
METR has previously partnered with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Amazon to pilot frontier risk assessments, and these companies have also provided access and tokens used for evaluations, research, and engineering. But crucially, METR has not accepted funding from AI companies. That independence is the whole point -- an evaluator funded by the companies it evaluates would face obvious conflicts of interest.
METR is also part of the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium and California Cybersecurity Task Force, partners with the AI Security Institute, and provides technical assistance to the European AI Office. In short, METR's work is already embedded in how governments and regulators think about AI risk.
The $71M and what it funds
The funding round is notable both for its size and its composition. Donors include The Audacious Project (a TED-housed funding initiative that provided METR's first institutional-scale grant), individuals from Jane Street, the Sijbrandij Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Schmidt Sciences, and the Packard Foundation, as well as individual donors like David Farhi, Geoff Ralston, Dylan Field, and Steve Newman. METR also receives a small amount of income from a technical assistance contract with the European AI Office.