Some thoughts. METR has gone to great lengths to avoid financial conflicts, to the point where I would treat them as negligible. But the question of its independence is also about culture, social connection, and - somewhat crucially - an intangible quality that one expects in an independent verifier org, that comes down to something like "experts in the technology tradition who have a neutral understanding of best practices, where that understanding is an unbiased synthesis of the field and its history." I would say the question of whether METR is independent in these three senses is largely political, and advocates will be wise to make the case without reflexively focusing on just the financial side of things. METR is very steeped in EA/rationalism/Berkeley culture. It is socially intertwined with the AI frontier scene and to the EA social scene. Staffers sometimes leave frontier labs and go to METR; is there a requirement that they liquidate their equity before going? The last quality, experts with a neutral understanding of best practices... this is the one where I think METR advocates will face steep challenges but also plausibly have the strongest arguments in favor of METR. Who can be said to know best practices, from a position of neutrality, in a field so exceedingly new? The blinding speed of AI progress makes such claims difficult. How does one differentiate METR's expertise from a fly-by-night operation that starts tomorrow? If one points out the connections to the labs and to the EA-funded AI safety scene, one undercuts the independence argument on social and financial grounds. If one doesn't use some credentialism, the bar to entering the verifier org space is very low and surely a bad faith actor will inject some confusion. I know many of my colleagues will want to reflexively defend METR to the hilt. Well-deservedly so. But my emphatic recommendation is that you do this very carefully; do not regard the defense of METR's defense or integrity as trivial.