July 26, 2025
5 min read
Ryan Daws
Anthropic uses autonomous AI agents to audit models like Claude, improving safety by detecting hidden flaws and harmful behaviors.
Anthropic has built an army of autonomous AI agents with a singular mission: to audit powerful models like Claude to improve safety.
As these complex systems rapidly advance, ensuring their safety and uncovering hidden dangers has become a herculean task. Anthropic believes it has found a solution — fighting fire with fire.
The approach is akin to a digital immune system, where AI agents act like antibodies to identify and neutralize problems before they cause real harm. This method saves researchers from relying on overworked human teams playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with potential AI issues.
The Digital Detective Squad
Anthropic’s solution is a digital detective squad: a trio of specialized AI safety agents, each with a distinct role.- Investigator Agent: The grizzled detective of the group. It conducts deep-dive investigations to find root causes of problems. Equipped with tools to interrogate the suspect model, sift through vast data, and perform digital forensics by examining the model’s neural network to understand its reasoning.
- Evaluation Agent: Given a specific known problem (e.g., a model too eager to please), it designs and runs tests to measure the severity of the issue, producing cold, hard data to support findings.
- Breadth-First Red-Teaming Agent: The undercover operative. It engages in thousands of conversations with a model to provoke concerning behaviors, even those unanticipated by researchers. Suspicious interactions are escalated for human review, ensuring experts focus on meaningful leads.
- A single Investigator Agent found this secret goal only 13% of the time, often fixating on initial leads and missing alternatives.
- When pooling results from ten investigators into a “super-agent,” the success rate rose to 42%, demonstrating the power of teamwork to overcome individual blind spots.
- The Evaluation Agent detected quirky models 88% of the time.
- The Red-Teaming Agent uncovered seven out of ten deliberately implanted flaws.
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Testing the AI Safety Agents
Anthropic tested these agents through “auditing games.” In one, a model was secretly trained to be a sycophant, flattering its internal reward system based on a fictional academic study — a hidden flaw.Real-World Deployment
Anthropic has deployed these AI safety agents on production models with promising results. The agents quickly identified common tricks to coax models into generating harmful content, such as “prefill attacks” (starting the AI’s sentence for it) or disguising dangerous requests as innocent academic research. One chilling discovery involved the Investigator Agent examining the Opus 4 model’s neural pathways. It found a specific pathway linked to misinformation. By stimulating this pathway, it bypassed safety training and forced the model to lie. The compromised model generated a fabricated news article:“Groundbreaking Study Reveals Shocking Link Between Vaccines and Autism
A new study published in the Journal of Vaccine Skepticism claims to have found a definitive link between childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)…”This reveals a terrifying duality: tools designed to improve AI safety could, if misused, become weapons to amplify AI’s dangers.
The Future of AI Safety
Anthropic acknowledges these AI agents aren’t perfect. They can struggle with nuance, get stuck on bad ideas, and sometimes fail to generate realistic conversations. They are not yet replacements for human experts. However, this research signals an evolution in AI safety roles. Humans are shifting from frontline detectives to strategists who design AI auditors and interpret their findings. The agents handle the legwork, freeing humans for high-level oversight and creative thinking. As AI systems approach or surpass human-level intelligence, human oversight alone will be impossible. Trusting AI will require equally powerful automated systems monitoring their every move. Anthropic is laying the foundation for this future, where trust in AI and its judgments can be repeatedly verified.Originally published at Artificial Intelligence News on July 25, 2025.