Technology

AI Giants Reportedly Neared Deal To Safety Test Each Other’s Models

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Two of the largest artificial intelligence labs held talks to safety-test each other’s models, according to a report.

OpenAI and Anthropic negotiated a legal agreement to test each other’s models, The Information reported Monday. The two AI labs reportedly held a joint safety evaluation in August 2025, during which OpenAI tested Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, while Anthropic tested OpenAI’s GPT-4.0, GPT-4.1 and other models.

It remains unclear if the two companies finalized the agreement; however, both have called for industry-wide efforts to pace the scale of AI development.

Anthropic and OpenAI each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

This is not the only time that leading AI executives have floated testing competitors’ models.

Elon Musk, who founded xAI — the developer of the Grok family of AI models — said that American AI creators and Chinese competitors should test each others models while speaking at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, California in September, according to the New York Post.

The AI safety debate became part of the national dialogue when Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic and OpenAI employee, in early September warned on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

In September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called to slow down AI development, citing potential safety risks to humanity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Musk and Dennis Hassabis, the chair of Google’s AI lab DeepMind, backed the idea of such a slowdown. Amodei also called for an antitrust exemption to have the industry work together on pacing AI development.

Other tech executives rejected calls for regulation or limiting AI development.

“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said regarding calls for regulation in the name of increasing AI safety, according to CNBC.

“Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on X in mid-September.

Anthropic partnered with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI models, the AI company announced in mid-September. The partnership serves as an important step in Anthropic’s mission to pace AI development and the two companies expect to invest over $1 billion in building its testing capacity over the next five years.

“To be clear, independent embedded evaluators do not reduce our accountability, but help to make it more verifiable. The safety of our models remains our responsibility,” Anthropic stated in its press release about its partnership with Accenture.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me,” Amodei wrote in his September essay explaining why he thinks AI companies need to hit the brakes on AI development.