Anthropic put $5m behind open evaluations of how models affect the people using them

Announced 25 August, the programme funds independent researchers, clinicians, psychologists and methodologists to build open-source benchmarks measuring AI's effect on user wellbeing, with direct funding, model access and technical support. Anthropic's stated reason is that the industry has no clear standard for model behaviour in sensitive contexts and that assessing wellbeing needs conversation history and individual circumstance rather than a single-turn score. Applications close 21 September, with full-proposal selections notified 5 October.

What it means Wellbeing has had no shared benchmark, so every claim about it has been a vendor claim. Funding the evaluations openly, with a September deadline anyone can meet, is a concrete route to a number that is checkable.