Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning 'World is in Peril'
3 77An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.
Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.
3 comments
We have lost our ability to debate and decide (Score: 5, Insightful)
by hadleyburg ( 823868 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @10:57PM (#65983950)
I don't have a good idea as to what has caused it, but look at any TV debate up to sometime around the 1980s and you are likely to find a logical discussion, with little tolerance for lies, exaggeration, or logical error. That seems to have gone now.
Scientists might show that we are in trouble, and the result is that the most powerful deride the scientists, and most voters are incapable of the thought required to arrive at an informed opinion.
Politics and social debate need to fundamentally change.
Re:Science: the god that failed (Score: 5, Insightful)
by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Thursday February 12, 2026 @02:14AM (#65984118)
It would be very amusing to see the world through your eyes.
How exactly do you think science works? Do you think that someone asks a question, and then scientists all get together in a single meeting to answer that question, and then they post the answer and claim it is the full and unquestionable truth?
No, that would be ridiculous. Instead, science is performed by millions of individual scientists, who each seek to understand some particular aspect of reality just a little bit better. They perform discovery, form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and then publish their results for the world to review.
There is no illuminati-style organization that coordinates all of the scientists, and their findings, together. Thus, one thousand different studies about various effects of coffee upon human health might be performed, and they might all study slightly different aspects of the topic, or test things in different ways. This in no way implies that the scientific method is flawed, or that "scientists" are just a bunch of goofy mind-changers who can never quite figure out which way is up when it comes to figuring out what science actually means.
This is to be expected for something as complex as science, unless you have an extraordinarily simple mind.
Surely (Score: 5, Interesting)
by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Thursday February 12, 2026 @12:26AM (#65984038)
The best place to prevent these concerns from happening is from the inside? Cynic in me thinks these safety people are hired to "quit" at opportune times with a fat exit package just when AI needs another marketing hype about how it's so powerful it'll change the world.