An Anthropic staffer who led a team researching AI safety departed the company on 9 February, darkly warning both of a world “in peril” and the difficulty in being able to let “our values govern our actions” without any elaboration in a public resignation letter that also suggested the company had set its values aside.
Anthropic safety researcher Mrinank Sharma's resignation letter garnered 1 million views by the 9th.
Mrinank Sharma, who had led Anthropic’s safeguards research team since its launch last year, shared his resignation letter in a post on 9 February X in the morning, which quickly garnered attention and has been viewed 1 million times.
In his letter, Sharma said it is “clear to me that the time has come to move on,” stating the “world is in peril,” not just from AI, but a “whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”
Sharma said he has “repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions” while at Anthropic, adding, “we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most,” though he did not offer any specifics. After leaving Anthropic, Sharma said he may pursue a poetry degree and “devote myself to the practice of courageous speech,” adding he wants to “contribute in a way that feels fully in my integrity.”
Sharma declined a request for comment (Forbes also reached out to Anthropic for comment and has not heard back).[1]
Crucial Quote - “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 wrote in his letter.
What Did Sharma do at Anthropic? Sharma, who has a Ph.D in machine learning from the University of Oxford, began working at Anthropic in August 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. According to his website, the team he formerly led at Anthropic, researches how to mitigate risks from AI. In his resignation letter, Sharma said some of his work included developing defenses against AI-assisted bioterrorism and researching AI sycophancy, the phenomenon where AI chatbots overly praise and flatter a user. According to a report published in May by Sharma’s team, the Safeguards Research Team had focused on researching and developing safeguards against actors using an AI chatbot to seek guidance on how to conduct malicious activities.
Sharma’s New Study Found That Chatbots Could Create Distorted Reality - According to a study Sharma published last week, in which he investigated how using AI chatbots could cause users to form a distorted perception of reality, he found “thousands” of these interactions that may produce these distortions “occur daily.” Severe instances of distorted perceptions of reality, which Sharma refers to as disempowerment patterns, are rare, but rates are higher regarding topics like relationships and wellness. Sharma said his findings “highlight the need for AI systems designed to robustly support human autonomy and flourishing.”
Other high-profile AI company employees have quit citing ethical concerns. Tom Cunningham, a former economic researcher at OpenAI, left the company in September and reportedly said in an internal message he had grown frustrated with the company allegedly becoming more hesitant to publish research that is critical of AI usage. In 2024, OpenAI dissolved Superalignment, a safety research team, after two of its key members resigned. One of these members, Jan Leike, who now leads safety research at Anthropic, said in a post on X upon his resignation that he had been “disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company's core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.” Gretchen Krueger, who left her post as an AI policy researcher shortly after Leike, said in posts on X the company needs to do more to improve “decision-making processes; accountability; transparency” and “mitigations for impacts on inequality, rights, and the environment.”
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[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropic-ai-safety-researcher-warns-of-world-in-peril-in-resignation/
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