An artificial intelligence (AI) safety researcher has resigned with a cryptic warning that the “world is in peril.”
Mrinank Sharma, who joined large language model developer Anthropic in 2023, announced his departure on X in an open letter to colleagues on Feb. 9. He was the leader of a team that researches AI safeguards.
Although he said he took pride in his work at Anthropic, the 30-year-old AI engineer wrote that “the time has come to move on,” adding that he had become aware of a multitude of crises that extend beyond AI.
“I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation,” Sharma wrote. “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.
“[Throughout] my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is truly let our values govern actions,” he added. “I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too.”
Sharma said he plans to pursue studying poetry and leave California for the United Kingdom to “become invisible for a period of time.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Anthropic for comment regarding Sharma’s departure and his concerns.
Anthropic, best known for its Claude chatbot, was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees with a focus on building safer AI systems. The company describes itself as a “public benefit corporation dedicated to securing [AI’s] benefits and mitigating its risks.”
Specifically, Anthropic says it focuses on two major safety risks: that highly capable AI systems could eventually surpass human experts while pursuing goals that conflict with human interests, and that rapid advances in AI could destabilize employment, economic systems, and societal structures.
“Some researchers who care about safety are motivated by a strong opinion on the nature of AI risks,” the company says on its website. “Our experience is that even predicting the behavior and properties of AI systems in the near future is very difficult.”
Anthropic regularly publishes safety evaluations of its models, including assessments of how they might be misused.
The researchers concluded that the overall risk is “very low but not negligible.” In newly developed tests where the model can use a computer interface, they said, both Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6 showed “elevated susceptibility to harmful misuse,” including instances of “knowingly supporting—in small ways—efforts toward chemical weapon development and other heinous crimes.”
Such behavior occurred only in highly contrived circumstances and was “rare and difficult to elicit,” the researchers said.
