Beth Barnes is doing the rare thing in this industry: publicly correcting the record against her own organization's interests. The substance matters more than the mea culpa — Anthropic effectively controls what counts as redactable, and 'commercially sensitive' is a category wide enough to drive a truck through. Her admission that METR depends on lab goodwill and can't afford fights over tone or judgment calls is among the most honest insider descriptions of third-party audit limits we've seen. In our view, this should recalibrate how much weight you give 'independent evaluator' findings: valuable, but structurally constrained. The fix isn't just more senior lawyers — it's funding models and disclosure norms that don't leave auditors commercially hostage to the very companies they audit. Worth reading alongside METR's transparency proposals.