Mrinank Sharma, who was leading the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic, has resigned from the company, saying that the “world is in peril”, not just from artificial intelligence (AI) or bioweapons, but from what he said was a “whole series of interconnected crises unfolding” currently.
Mrinank Sharma was leading the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic in San Francisco. (https://www.mrinanksharma.net/)
Anthropic, an American AI company headquartered in San Francisco, California, shot to fame with its AI model, Claude. Amid growing investor concerns about how AI could transform the economy, Anthropic released new tools designed to automate work tasks in various industries. This move further triggered fears that the innovations would harm many businesses.
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In a post on X, Sharma shared a letter detailing his resignation. He said, “I’ve decided to leave Anthropic…I’ve achieved what I wanted to here. I arrived in San Francisco two years ago, having wrapped up my PhD and wanting to contribute to AI safety. I feel lucky to have been able to contribute to what I have here: understanding AI sycophancy and its causes; developing defences to reduce risks from AI-assisted bioterrorism; actually putting those defences into production; and writing one of the first AI safety cases.”
Sharma expressed pride over his recent efforts, especially his final project on “understanding how AI assistants could make us less human or distort our humanity”.
However, he said, it was time for him to move on. “I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation. The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, 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,” Sharma stated.
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He noted that throughout his time at Anthropic, he has repeatedly realised that how difficult “it is to truly let our values govern our actions”.
Sharma agreed that within the company and himself, there is constant pressure to set aside what matters the most, and the same is seen across the broader society, too.
What’s next for Mrinank Sharma?
Mrinank Sharma expressed his wish to contribute in a way that falls under his integrity, while allowing him to bring “to bear more of my particularities”.
“I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me, the questions that David Whyte would say “have no right to go away”, the questions that Rilke implores us to “live”. For me, this means leaving,” Sharma said in his letter.
Sharma did not detail what he would do next. Instead, he quoted a famous Zen quote, “not knowing is most intimate”.
He stated that he intends to create a space where he can set aside the structures that have held him in the past years and figure out what can emerge in their absence.
“I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing, both of which I believe have something essential to contribute when developing new technology,” Sharma wrote.
Mrinank Sharma said he hopes to explore a degree in poetry and devote himself to the practice of courageous speech.
“I am also excited to deepen my practice of facilitation, coaching, community building, and group work. We shall we what unfolds,” he added. Lastly, Mrinank Sharma signed off on the letter with what he said is one of his favourite poems, “The Way It Is” by William Stafford.
In a separate post, Sharma said that he will be moving back to the United Kingdom and “letting myself become invisible for a period of time”.