AI safety researcher quits with a cryptic warning

A top artificial intelligence safety researcher has resigned from Anthropic with an enigmatic warning about “interconnected crises,” announcing his plans to become “invisible for a period of time.”Mrinank Sharma, an Oxford graduate who led the Claude chatbot maker’s Safeguards Research Team, posted his resignation letter on X Monday, describing a growing personal 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,” Sharma wrote to colleagues.

The departure comes amid mounting tensions surrounding the San Francisco-based AI lab, which is simultaneously racing to develop ever more powerful systems while its own executives warn that those same technologies could harm humanity.