Reuters: Anthropic and OpenAI sought significant control over what outside evaluators can publish, citing trade secrets

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Key facts

• Source: Reuters exclusive, Oct 13, 2026, ‘Behind AI industry’s call for independent reviews, a fight over what gets made public’; Techmeme credits Aditya Soni. Based on ‘two people familiar with the discussions’ plus a third person with knowledge of past dealings with the labs. Reuters says it is the first report of these negotiations
• The earlier promises (Reuters): Dario Amodei said in September that external evaluators should be able to publish key findings ‘without editorial control’; OpenAI said days later that assessors should have ‘editorial independence’
• The concern: staff of evaluators working inside the labs (‘embedded evaluation’) could carry proprietary information to rivals. Measures under discussion: lab employees observing embedded teams as they work, and barring evaluators embedded at one lab from working at another at the same time (one source)
• Timeline per the sources: ‘as recently as October 5’ both labs sought strict editorial control over publications; ‘by October 8’ talks between Anthropic and some evaluators ‘appeared to have evolved’
• Anthropic’s reply (Reuters): the description does not accurately characterize all of its discussions; with evaluators it has worked with before, the reviewers control their methods, evaluation criteria, conclusions and what to publish; for new evaluator firms it ‘reserved the right to comment on and approve reports’ while a working relationship is built
• OpenAI’s reply (Reuters): it is not seeking approval rights over the full text of reports; its standard practice is to redact confidential information, and evaluators may disclose whether major redactions were made
• Existing contracts: language in certain lab contracts with evaluation firms can bar them from publishing confidential information without the company’s consent, according to a contract Reuters saw. (The Next Web’s rewrite states the opposite; we follow the Reuters text)
• On the record: Faculty CEO Marc Warner (Anthropic’s first embedded evaluator, part of Accenture): ‘Evaluators are only useful if people can trust what they report, so independence and transparency are critical.’ Rumman Chowdhury (Humane Intelligence; former US science envoy for AI): ‘Evaluators have this very privileged access, but whether explicitly or implicitly, they know that it comes at a cost’