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A wave of high-profile resignations has hit the AI industry, with leading researchers abandoning prestigious roles and issuing dire warnings about the technology’s direction.
Mrinank Sharma, a senior safety leader at Anthropic, has quit his position to move back to the UK and pursue a degree in poetry, claiming the “world is in peril.”
Sharma, who led the Safeguards Research Team at the San Francisco-based firm, announced his departure in a cryptic letter shared on social media.
He stated that humanity is approaching a critical threshold where “our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”
The researcher’s concerns extend beyond just AI, citing “interconnected crises” involving bioweapons and a broader societal decline. During his tenure, Sharma’s work focused on preventing AI-assisted bioterrorism and investigating how digital assistants might “make us less human.”
He admitted that even at a safety-focused firm like Anthropic, employees “constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most.”
Values v commercial pressure
The exodus is not limited to Anthropic. At rival firm OpenAI, researcher Zoe Hitzig also resigned this week, specifically citing the company’s decision to introduce advertising into ChatGPT. Hitzig warned that the chatbot has amassed an unprecedented archive of “human candor,” including users’ medical fears and religious beliefs.
“Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent,” Hitzig wrote in a New York Times essay. She argued that the drive for engagement and revenue creates “strong incentives to override” safety rules, mirroring the early mistakes of social media giants.
The trend of “technical exits” suggests a growing rift between the developers of AI and the corporate structures that fund them. For Sharma, the solution is a radical retreat from the industry entirely.
He stated his intention to become “invisible” for a time, seeking “poetic truth” alongside scientific truth as a necessary way of navigating the current global moment.
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