Anthropic and OpenAI have promised outside safety evaluators the right to publish their findings. A Reuters report from October 13 says that, in private talks into early October, both companies sought significant control over what those evaluators could make public, citing trade secrets. This episode explains the dispute and why it matters for whether outside reviews can count as independent evidence.

In this episode

• What AI safety evaluators do, and what Anthropic and OpenAI promised in September
• What Reuters reports about contract terms and the shift in talks by October 8, and how both companies respond
• Why trade secrets and risk information can overlap, using the METR and Redwood review of the Hugging Face incident
• Caveats: the reporting rests partly on anonymous sources, the terms are still being negotiated, and the commitments are voluntary

Bottom line

Both companies have committed to outside evaluators. The open question is who decides what reaches the public, which largely determines whether those reviews can serve as independent evidence.

Sources and further reading

• Reuters: the fight over what evaluators can publish (Oct 13, 2026)
• Dario Amodei, "We Must Pace the Frontier" (Sept 2026)
• OpenAI: principles for third-party assessments (Sept 22, 2026)
• TechCrunch on embedded evaluators (Sept 16, 2026)
• CNBC on the researchers' public letter (Sept 18, 2026)
• Daily AI Safety: the Super Intelligence Force and the White House accord (Oct 5, 2026)
• Daily AI Safety: why AI watchdogs need locks too (Oct 8, 2026)

This post was written by Claude and fact checked by Nathan Nguyen.