METR

METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) is a nonprofit that evaluates advanced AI models for dangerous capabilities. It began in 2022 as ARC Evals, a team that Beth Barnes led inside the Alignment Research Center (ARC), the alignment-theory organization run by Paul Christiano, and on December 4, 2023, announced its separation into a standalone 501(c)(3) under its present name. The name, pronounced "meter," "nods to metrology," the science of measurement.¹²

Spin-Off

Announcing the separation on September 19, 2023, Barnes wrote that ARC had hired her in 2022 and incubated ARC Evals, that Christiano "remained focused on theory, but spent a significant minority of his time overseeing and advising on evaluations work," and that the team had completed independent evaluations of OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude in partnership with the two companies and had partnered with the United Kingdom's Foundation Model Taskforce. Both the September announcement and the December renaming carried the same note: "While we had initially planned for Paul Christiano to be a board member and advisor, he declined involvement in light of his new role as Head of Safety at the US AI Safety Institute."¹²

Before the separation, Open Philanthropy gave ARC 265,000 dollars for general support in March 2022 and 1,250,000 dollars over two years in November 2022.³

Filings and People

The organization is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as Model Evaluation And Threat Research, EIN 99-1219864, at a mailing address in Covina, California; its tax exemption was ruled on March 1, 2024. For 2024 it reported revenue of 13,639,155 dollars and assets of 6,544,206 dollars.⁴

Its website lists Barnes as founder and chief executive, Chris Painter, formerly a technology and national security fellow at the Defense Department's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, as president, Hjalmar Wijk as chief scientist and Nate Rush as chief technology officer. Adam Gleave, chief executive of FAR.AI, and Rajiv Dattani are listed as advisers and board members, and Alec Radford, Chase Hasbrouck, Marco Mascorro and Yoshua Bengio as advisers. Christiano is not listed. Ajeya Cotra, formerly Open Philanthropy's senior program officer for AI risk, appears among the technical staff, not among the advisers or board.⁵ Jasmine Dhaliwal, who leads federal government engagement and communications, was previously chief of staff at FutureHouse and, according to her METR biography, "was also Chief of Staff at Open Philanthropy."⁶

Funding and Canary

METR states that it has not accepted funding from AI companies, "though we make use of significant free tokens," and that it cannot accept donations "made by or at the direction of frontier AI company employees." It lists as funders The Audacious Project, individuals from Jane Street, the Sijbrandij Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Schmidt Sciences, the Packard Foundation, the LaCentra-Sumerlin Foundation, the Astralis Foundation and Expa.org, the AI Security Institute, the pooled funds of Longview Philanthropy and Effektiv Spenden, recommendations by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and individuals including David Farhi, Geoff Ralston, Dylan Field and Steve Newman. Open Philanthropy is not named on the list.⁵ In August 2026 it said it had "raised commitments of around $71 million" in the preceding six months.⁷

In October 2024 METR announced that the Audacious Project, a funding initiative housed at TED, had "catalyzed approximately $38 million of funding for Canary, a collaboration with METR and RAND focused on developing and deploying evaluations to monitor AI systems for dangerous capabilities," about 17 million dollars of it for METR.⁸ The Audacious Project names the RAND Corporation's president, Jason Matheny, and Barnes as the project's leads.⁹ In September 2025 Open Philanthropy gave RAND 10 million dollars over three years "in support of Canary, a collaboration between RAND and METR," on the recommendation of Trevor Levin of its AI governance and policy team.¹⁰