person
Beth Barnes
Founder of METR; dangerous capability evaluations
Formerly at ARC Evals; now runs METR, which designs and runs frontier model evaluations for dangerous capabilities. Central figure in the evals-driven governance ecosystem.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
Founder/CEO of METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research). Designed many frontier-model dangerous-capability evals. Earlier OpenAI alignment.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Recognised in evals and safety circles. Less mainstream press.
vintage
Scaling era
Worldview formed during GPT-2/3, scaling laws, Anthropic's founding. Pre-ChatGPT but post-deep-learning. The 'scale is all you need' debate is live.
Earlier OpenAI alignment ~2020. Founded METR 2022. Career maps to the scaling-era evals push.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Evals-drivenendorses
Capability/risk evals gate deployment; evals are the load-bearing artefactDesigns autonomous-task evaluations that labs and governments rely on to gauge whether models cross dangerous thresholds.
If we are going to trust safety commitments, we need evaluations that are independent, reproducible, and well-funded.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Beth Barnes's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.