A case file on METR — who they are, who pays, who holds the tripwire
Classification: Open-source investigation. Not a criminal brief.
Compiled: 15 September 2026
Method: Corporate filings, IRS Form 990 extracts, grant ledgers, primary essays, METR’s own site, contemporaneous reporting.
Standard of proof: Documented fact is labeled as such. Inference is labeled as such. Unproven claims are listed in a separate drawer.
0. The brief
METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) presents itself as an independent nonprofit that measures whether frontier AI systems can act autonomously — and therefore whether they are too dangerous to scale.
That sentence is true as far as it goes.
The rest of the file is about the rest:
- METR was incubated inside Paul Christiano’s Alignment Research Center.
- ARC’s founding board was Christiano plus two Open Philanthropy AI people (Holden Karnofsky, Daniel Dewey).
- In March 2024 METR incorporated in Delaware. Its first directors were Beth Barnes, Emma Abele, and Adam Gleave.
- In May 2024 ARC sent METR $4,477,169 labeled “Program Spin-Off.” Compilers treat METR as parent and ARC as subordinate.
- The same human (Kyle Scott) is treasurer of both charities in the same year, pay split across the two EINs.
- Reviews of lab models are routinely done under NDA. OpenAI has had to approve METR blog posts about those reviews.
- Responsible Scaling Policies — the “if the model can do X, pause” template now used by multiple labs — were prototyped at METR / ARC Evals.
- Philanthropic money (Tallinn / SFF, Audacious / TED, DAFs, Coefficient’s sibling-lab grants) built the cluster. Labs supply tokens and access, not cash.
- In September 2026 Dario Amodei proposed embedding METR-style evaluators inside frontier labs with badges and laptops. Anthropic committed first. Sam Altman said OpenAI would match.
- Jane Street individuals appear on METR’s public donor list. Jane Street the firm is an Anthropic shareholder and a large buyer of AI compute.
What this is not: a documented cash-for-halt bribe.
What this is: a private standards body built by one network, funded by that network, reviewing the labs under the labs’ legal wrappers, now being invited to live inside the labs — while the same network’s preferred lab asks the industry to “pace” and treat that body as the verifier.
A halt, if it ever happens, will look like those tripwires firing with this cluster holding the clipboard.
See repository README and full sections in this file for timeline, filings, money, people, RSPs, NDAs, the September 2026 embed, Jane Street, cui bono, what is not proven, verdict, and sources.