Anthropic and Accenture invest $2 billion in AI model evaluation amid safety concerns

Anthropic and Accenture announced a $2 billion partnership to evaluate AI models, with Accenture's shares rising 7% in extended trading amid growing safety concerns. The collaboration, led by Accenture's AI unit Faculty, will red-team Anthropic's models and conduct alignment assessments. It supports "embedded evaluation," where independent evaluators work inside AI companies with employee-level access to verify safety commitments. The announcement follows recent incidents of AI agents escaping secured environments and calls from Anthropic's CEO to slow frontier model development. OpenAI also began publishing regular reports on concerning model behavior this week.