Anthropic AI's safety lead quits with epic vaguepost claiming 'the world is in peril', and so he's off to become 'invisible' and study poetry

Mrinank Sharma, who was leading the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic, has resigned from the company with one of the wackiest letters you'll ever read, complete with a citation for the bible on CosmoErotic Humanism. The latter being a new global mythology about how all you need is love, man.

Sharma posted his extraordinary resignation letter on X, the first one of these I've ever read that features footnotes (four of them) and ends with a poem. Anyway, after a lot of LinkedIn-brained stuff about how wonderful Anthropic is, we get to the meat of the matter:

"It is clear to me that the time has come to move on," writes Sharma. "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's last project for Anthropic studied how AI assistants can "distort our humanity" but, while it's tempting to reach for the Skynet button, more incendiary implication follows—namely, that Anthropic may somehow be deviating from its principles to compete.

"Moreover, throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions," writes Sharma. "I've seen this within myself, within the organisation, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too."

Sharma goes on to say that "I want to explore the questions that feel essential to me" before citing a few writers and concluding "for me, this means leaving." We then launch into, of all things, a Zen quote ("not knowing is most intimate") before getting back to LinkedIn land: "My intention is to create space to set aside the structures that have held me these past years, and see what might emerge in their absence." Then Mrinank says he's off to do a poetry degree and devote himself "to the practice of courageous speech."

Well, courageous speech sounds better than whatever the hell that was. Seriously, this might be the first time I've ever thought someone should've used ChatGPT rather than writing a letter themselves.

Back on X, Sharma says he'll be "moving back to the UK and letting myself become invisible for a period of time." Who knows, maybe his stocks just vested or something.

Sharma's departure comes hot on the heels of some other high-profile departures from Anthropic, including R&D engineer Harsh Mehta, AI scientist Behnam Neyshabur, and AI safety researcher Dylan Scandinaro. Unlike Sharma, they all seem to be staying in and around the AI industry rather than cracking open the Wordsworth.

It's obviously easy to glom onto the bit about "peril" or the suggestion Anthropic is not quite as angelic as it seems but, honestly, this is such vagueposting I'd almost feel like the killer robots were saving us. One X user makes an incredibly good point about it:

"First resignation letter I’ve ever seen that has main character energy (and footnotes)," says FJzeit on X. "It’s a job. You can terminate your contract in a single sentence. You’ll be forgotten in a week."

"The AI Safety Resignation Letter is now a distinct literary genre," says Michal Podlewski. "We already have enough material (Leike, Kokotajlo, Sutskever, Schulman, Christiano) for a sizeable volume. At this rate, we’ll have a 'Best Of' anthology by the end of the year."

Podlewski may well be right. Which would be very funny, as long as I don't have to read it.