METR

METR (an acronym for Model Evaluation and Threat Research, pronounced "meter"), is a nonprofit research institute that evaluates frontier AI models' capabilities to carry out long-horizon, agentic tasks that some researchers argue could pose catastrophic risks to society.^[1][2] They have worked with leading AI companies to conduct pre-deployment model evaluations and contribute to system cards, including OpenAI's o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.5, and Anthropic's Claude models.^[2][3][4][5]

METR

Formation	2022; 3 years ago (2022)
Founder	Beth Barnes
Type	Nonprofit research institute
Legal status	501(c)(3) tax exempt charity
Purpose	AI safety research and model evaluation
Location	Berkeley, California
Website	metr.org

METR's CEO and founder is Beth Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI who left in 2022 to form ARC Evals, the evaluation division of Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. In December 2023, ARC Evals was then spun off into an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit and renamed METR.^[6][7][8]

Research

A substantial amount of METR's research is focused on the capabilities of AI systems to conduct research and development of AI systems themselves, including RE-Bench, a benchmark designed to test whether AIs can "solve research engineering tasks and accelerate AI R&D".^[9][10]

A graph showing that the length of tasks frontier models are capable of executing at a 50% success rate doubled every 7 months from 2019-2024. The shaded region represents a 95% confidence interval.^[11]

In March 2025, METR published a paper noting that the length of software engineering tasks that the leading AI model could complete had a doubling time of around 7 months between 2019–2024.^[12]