"Petri (Parallel Exploration Tool for Risky Interactions) is our new open-source tool that enables researchers to explore hypotheses about model behavior with ease. Petri deploys an automated agent to test a target AI system through diverse multi-turn conversations involving simulated users and tools; Petri then scores and summarizes the target’s behavior.

This automation handles a significant part of the work that one needs to do to build a broad understanding of a new model, and makes it possible to test many individual hypotheses about how a model might behave in some new circumstance with only minutes of hands-on effort.

As AI becomes more capable and is deployed across more domains and with wide-ranging affordances, we need to evaluate a broader range of behaviors. This makes it increasingly difficult for humans to properly audit each model—the sheer volume and complexity of potential behaviors far exceeds what researchers can manually test.

We’ve found it valuable to turn to automated auditing agents to help address this challenge. We used them in the Claude 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 System Cards to better understand behaviors such as situational awareness, whistleblowing, and self-preservation, and adapted them for head-to-head comparisons between heterogeneous models as part of a recent exercise with OpenAI. Our recent research release on alignment-auditing agents found these methods can reliably flag concerning behaviors in many settings. The UK AI Security Institute also used a pre-release version of Petri to build evaluations that they used in their testing of Sonnet 4.5."

https://www.anthropic.com/research/petri-open-source-auditing

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #OpenSource #Chatbots #AISafety