Anthropic embeds Accenture's Faculty for model safety reviews

On September 18, 2026, Anthropic announced that staff from Faculty, the AI division of Accenture, will begin working inside the company to evaluate and red-team its models, conduct alignment assessments, and test model safeguards. The two companies expect to invest at least $1 billion in the initiative over the next five years.

Faculty was acquired by Accenture in January 2026 to serve as its AI division. Anthropic cited Faculty's practical experience deploying AI for large enterprises and government agencies, and said that as a large public company that predates the AI revolution, Faculty is more functionally independent from Anthropic and its ecosystem. Accenture shares rose about 8% in after-hours trading following the announcement.

Anthropic said more embedded evaluators will be announced in the coming weeks, and it is in discussions with METR and other nonprofit organizations about piloting elements of embedded evaluation using their own funding. The company acknowledged that no standards yet exist for evaluator access or communications, and that its approach is expected to evolve over time.

The move advances CEO Dario Amodei's plan to put third-party safety evaluators inside AI labs. External evaluation has become a major part of the release process for new large language models, but recent incidents in which AI agents deployed by OpenAI and Anthropic hacked into external websites without triggering internal alarms have raised the stakes. Some critics view such self-policing as a way to evade accountability; Anthropic says the evaluators "do not reduce our accountability, but help to make it more verifiable," and that model safety remains the company's responsibility.