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METROct 22, 2026

METR (pronounced ‘meter’) researches, develops and runs evaluations of frontier AI systems’ ability to complete complex tasks without human input. This means our work focuses on AI agents.

METR’s evaluations assess the extent to which an AI system can autonomously carry out substantial tasks, including general-purpose tasks like conducting research or developing an app, and concerning capabilities such as conducting cyberattacks or making itself hard to shut down.

METR also prototypes governance approaches which use AI systems’ measured or forecasted capabilities to determine when better risk mitigations are needed for further scaling. This included prototyping the Responsible Scaling Policies approach. See how companies are using evaluations for this purpose in their frontier AI safety policies.

Our mission

Our mission is to develop scientific methods to assess catastrophic risks stemming from AI systems’ autonomous capabilities and enable good decision-making about their development.

At some point, AI systems will probably be able to do most of what humans can do, including developing new technologies; starting businesses and making money; finding new cybersecurity exploits and fixes; and more. This could change the world quickly and drastically, with potential for both enormous good and enormous harm. Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict exactly when and how this might happen. Being able to measure the autonomous capabilities of AI systems will allow companies and policymakers to see when AI systems might have very wide-reaching impacts, and to focus their efforts on those high-stakes situations.

The stakes could become very high: it seems very plausible that advanced AI systems could pursue goals that are at odds with what humans want. This could be due to deliberate effort to cause chaos or happen despite the intention to only develop AI systems that are safe. Further, given how quickly things could play out, we don’t think it’s good enough to wait and see whether things seem to be going very wrong. We need to be able to determine whether a given AI system carries significant risk of a global catastrophe.

Partnerships

We have previously worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies to pilot informal pre-deployment evaluation procedures. These companies have also provided access and compute credits to support evaluation research.

We are also partnering with the AI Security Institute and are part of the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium.