An Anthropic researcher just announced his resignation in a cryptic and poetry-laden letter warning of a world “in peril.”
The employee, Mrinank Sharma, had led the Claude chatbot maker’s Safeguards Research Team since it was formed early last year and has been at the company since 2023. While at the company, Sharma said he explored the causes of AI sycophancy, developed defenses against “AI-assisted bioterrorism,” and wrote “one of the first AI safety cases.”
But on Monday, he posted that it would be his last day at the company, uploading a copy of a letter he shared with colleagues. It‘s painfully devoid of specifics, but hints at at some internal tensions over the tech’s safety.
“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” Sharma said, claiming that employees “constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.”
He also issued a crypic warning about the global state of affairs.
“I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons,” he wrote, “but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”
“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences,” he continued, in no less vague terms.
The resignation comes after Anthropic’s newly released Claude Cowork model helped kick off a stock market nosedive over fears that its new plugins could upend massive software customers and automate some white collar jobs, especially in legal roles.
Amid the selloff, The Telegraph reported that employees privately fretted over their own AI’s potential to hollow out the labor market.
“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job,” one staffer said in an internal survey. “In the long term, I think AI will end up doing everything and make me and many others irrelevant,” another confided.
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