Accenture shares jump on Anthropic AI partnership

Investing.com -- Accenture shares rose more than 6.5% in after-hours trading Friday following the announcement of a partnership with Anthropic to evaluate frontier artificial intelligence models. Both companies will invest at least $1 billion each in the initiative over the next five years.

Faculty, Accenture's AI business unit, will lead the partnership. The work will involve evaluating and red-teaming Anthropic's models, conducting alignment assessments, and testing model safeguards.

The partnership uses an embedded evaluation structure, where evaluators operate inside AI companies with access similar to employees. This structure allows evaluators to observe models during training, monitor decisions about how models are built and deployed, and interact directly with staff. Anthropic will fund Accenture's work directly under this arrangement.

Anthropic noted that embedded evaluation differs from existing external evaluation practices. The company said there are currently no established standards for what information embedded evaluators should access or how findings should be reported. The company stated that long-term funding for such evaluations should ideally come from pooled or government sources.

The partnership is non-exclusive. Anthropic plans to announce additional evaluators in the coming weeks, and Accenture may work with other AI developers in similar capacities. Anthropic said it is in discussions with METR and other nonprofit evaluators to pilot elements of embedded evaluation using separate funding.

Anthropic stated that using independent evaluators does not transfer responsibility for model safety away from the company.

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