Accenture and Anthropic are partnering to create a team of evaluators that will work alongside Anthropic’s internal teams and safety partners to assess and red-team its AI models.
The companies said they each expect to invest at least $1 billion over the next five years in AI safety, taking the planned combined investment to at least $2 billion.
The partnership will be led by Faculty, Accenture’s specialist AI business. Its work will include evaluating models, conducting red-team exercises, carrying out alignment assessments and testing safeguards.
Evaluators to work inside Anthropic
The partnership will use an approach Anthropic calls “embedded evaluation”, where independent evaluators work within an AI company rather than assessing its systems entirely from the outside.
According to IPO-bound Anthropic, these evaluators will have access comparable to employees. This could allow them to observe models during training, understand decisions around how systems are developed and deployed, and interact directly with employees working on them.
Anthropic said the model could help evaluators assess whether the company is following its safety commitments and identify potential blind spots. They could also report incidents and provide a more informed view of the benefits and risks associated with frontier AI.
“Independent embedded evaluators do not reduce our accountability, but help to make it more verifiable. The safety of our models remains our responsibility,” Anthropic said.
Anthropic says framework is still evolving
Anthropic said there are currently no common standards defining what information embedded evaluators should be able to access or how their findings should be reported.
There is also no established system for funding independent evaluation. Anthropic said it ultimately expects funding for such work to come from pooled or government sources, but will initially fund Accenture’s work directly.
The company is also in discussions with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to test elements of embedded evaluation through their own funding arrangements.
Anthropic said it wants frontier AI companies to eventually work with several evaluation organisations operating under shared standards.
Partnership will not be exclusive
The arrangement between Anthropic and Accenture is non-exclusive. Anthropic said it plans to work with additional evaluators, while Accenture will also work with other AI developers in similar capacities.
The company said it expects its approach to change as embedded evaluation develops and the wider field matures.
Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, said the partnership would combine technical expertise with an understanding of how AI is used across industries.
“Accenture is bringing together a dedicated team with deep AI, security and industry expertise to work alongside Anthropic,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “Safety requires both deep technical expertise and a clear understanding of how AI is used in the real world. Embedded evaluation is an emerging area and we look forward to partnering with Anthropic to help accelerate the development of embedded evaluators, which we see as an important part of the safety landscape going forward.”
Marc Warner, chief technology officer at Accenture and CEO of Faculty, said the unit’s work is based on developing AI with safety considerations built into the process.
“Faculty, which is now part of Accenture, was founded on the belief that AI should be safe by design, not safe by accident. That conviction has guided our work with governments, defense, and healthcare systems across the world. Joining forces with Anthropic as embedded evaluators is exactly the kind of work Faculty was built to do—and as part of Accenture, we have the platform to do it at a scale that can genuinely move the industry.”
Anthropic said it will continue to train and release frontier models while bringing additional independent evaluators into its development process.
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First Published on September 19, 2026, 10:21:02 IST
