Review of the "Misalignment in high-stakes settings" section in Anthropic's Risk Report (August 2026)

Scope and access: this review was written based solely on Anthropic’s internal Risk Report from August 2026 and is relatively lightweight. The authors of this review were engaged prior to the “An update on independent evaluators” announcement and did not have the level of access to information described in that post. We expect future engagements to be governed by different terms. Redaction summary statement: Anthropic had the right to veto publication of this review and to redact any part of it. No redactions were made to our review and we did not change any of our conclusions during the publication review process. METR made minor changes to our review in response to feedback from Anthropic, but these changes were limited to minor wording and clarification, as well as improving the methodology of an experiment we ran. METR conducted an external review of the “Misalignment in high-stakes settings” section of Anthropic’s Risk Report: August 2026. Anthropic’s report concludes that, as of July 15, 2026, “the risk of catastrophic harm caused by misalignment of [their] models is low.” Our best guess is that we agree with Anthropic that the risk of catastrophic harm from misalignment is low for the models covered in…