Early Anthropic hire, former METR COO have found a way to rein in rogue AI agents; plus, health benefits platform Thatch reaches $1B valuation

0:01This is TechCrunch.

0:30right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. So I was new to this whole website building thing, but Framer helped me get set up and running incredibly fast. For instance, I wanted to add a blog to my website. It was super easy. Starting with a basic blog page template, I added some breakpoints and then jumped into customizing my layout, adding my own special touches with Framer's intuitive tools, and bam, I was ready to start letting my thoughts flow. See why thousands are trusting Framer to help build their websites. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro Annual Plan.

1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. A day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job over concerns that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, TechCrunch's Julie Bort met with founders and brothers-in-law Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dutani, and they think they've got a solution that could save us all, or at least help prevent AI agents from going rogue inside enterprises. Kvist, an early Anthropic employee who is also married to Dutani's sister, said, AI is getting smarter at an increasingly rapid rate. The surprising thing about AI is that it becomes harder to adopt and harder to control as AI gets smarter, not easier.

1:59Dottani is the former COO of the AI safety research organization Meter, and the pair launched a startup called Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company that hopes to bring AI safety to enterprises and companies building AI models and agents. The startup names Cursor, Lovable, Harvey and Eleven Labs as customers. On Tuesday, AIUC announced a$40 million Series A led by Rivet Capital with participation from First Harmonic. It previously closed a$15 million seed round from Nat Friedman through the fund NFDG, along with Emergence, Terrain, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann, among others, bringing its total funding to$55 million.

2:45Now, what caught the attention of this A-list group of investors is AIUC's attempt to apply a familiar cybersecurity model to a new set of AI risks. The company has built a third-party audit and certification layer for AI agents. Kvist said, banks, hospitals, governments, and militaries no longer decline to deploy AI because a model isn't smart enough. They decline because they've made commitments to their own customers about what a system will and won't do. And nobody can currently guarantee that. Using the widely adopted cybersecurity standard SOC 2 as its muse, AIUC has developed a standard called AIUC-1 and a testing service to validate agents against the standard.

3:29To build the standard, AIUC assembled a consortium of about 250 security and risk leaders, the buyers of agents, and Datani said, you know, these are the people who we meet with on a monthly basis, and the question we ask them is, when you're buying agents from someone, what would you look for? What are the questions you'd want to ask? And what would you want to see addressed? That feedback shapes the tests. The startup then runs an agent through a suite of some 5 ,000 tests to see how it behaves in scenarios involving jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks. The results produce a roughly 100-page report detailing where an agent performs safely and reliably and where it does not.

4:12Interestingly, AIUC uses AI agents to run the tests and AI to analyze the data. Humans, however, verify the final audit, according to Kvist. Now, if this sounds a bit familiar, well, it is. Datani's former employer, Meter, where he was COO from 2024 through 2025 and remains a board member, does similar testing for the Frontier Labs, though its work until recently has focused mostly on performance, whether agents can reliably complete tasks, that is. Meter was one of the independent research orgs that OpenAI used to investigate its hugging face incident. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei has also recently called for the AI industry to pace frontier development, citing a rapid increase in bad behavior incidents.

5:02In his post, Amadei floated the idea of requiring frontier labs to use embedded third-party evaluators to observe and verify safety, and named Meter as one possibility. While AIUC is not proposing to embed itself at customer sites, the overall idea is similar. Give enterprises an independent assessment of how safe their AI agents are. Datani said, Here's where it passes and where you can trust it. And here's where there's some concerns. You should be aware of those references before you make the decision to buy.

5:41Thatch is a platform that lowers health care costs for employers while expanding plan choices for workers. And the company just raised$108 million at a billion-dollar valuation from existing investors. The General Partnership, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, and Andreessen Horowitz. The new fundraise comes 17 months after Thatch raised a$40 million Series B at a$410 million valuation. That's according to PitchBook. That's a remarkable valuation leap for a company that is not, at its core, an AI startup. Thatch grew its annual recurring revenue about seven times. Co-founder and CEO Chris Ellis told TechCrunch.

6:22Ellis co-founded Thatch in 2021 with former Stripe engineering exec Adam Stevenson. Two major forces are driving the startup's growth. First, employer healthcare costs keep surging, with 2027 expenses projected to jump over 8%, the largest increase since 2003. At the same time, employees are increasingly eager to access new treatments like GLP-1 drugs, which traditional health plans rarely cover. Thatch helps employers keep health care costs manageable by offering an individual plan marketplace through what's known as an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement, a model created by federal regulation back in 2020 that lets companies fund employees' own individual insurance plans instead of enrolling everyone in one company-wide plan.

7:14Under these ICHRAs, which recently rebranded as Choice, employers no longer have to negotiate traditional healthcare arrangements and agreements with individual insurance carriers like Anthem or UnitedHealthcare. Instead, companies set a fixed health budget for each worker, who can then use those pre-tax funds to choose among dozens of health, dental, and vision plans on Thatch's marketplace. Thatch uses AI to recommend the optimal health plan for each employee's specific needs. Those needing extensive care can supplement their allowance out of pocket for comprehensive coverage. Healthier workers, meanwhile, can opt for lower-cost plans and use the leftover funds via a Thatch debit card for other eligible health expenses like GOP-1s or an Oura ring, say.

8:04Ellis claims that this arrangement is a win-win for employers and workers. He said, if employees don't like their insurance, they can switch to another one. It creates pressure on insurers to compete for better service, denying fewer claims because they want to keep you as a customer. The benefit to employers is that they no longer have to renegotiate with carriers annually. Yet, they can still provide the same level of coverage, often at a slightly lower cost. Thatch is not the only company taking advantage of the six-year-old regulation to offer employers an alternative to the traditional healthcare benefits model.

8:43Competitors include other startups, such as Take Command, Remodel Health, and Zorro. Ellis said, people are waking up to this because of costs, but then they're realizing this is a better, more efficient way to do it. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

9:09Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap charity. A Carnival Cruise vacation. Gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy. Peel then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag. No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. age 18 plus. See play at mcd.com for rules and play at mcd.com slash AMOE for info and playing without purchase by mail. by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.