Mrinank Sharma, an Indian-origin AI safety researcher at Anthropic, has resigned from the company, saying the “world is in peril” amid a series of interconnected crises and that he now wants to focus on writing and poetry.
Sharma announced his decision in a post on X, where he shared a detailed resignation letter.
Anthropic, a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company known for its chatbot Claude, has positioned itself as a major player in AI safety and responsible development.
In his letter, Sharma wrote, “I've decided to leave Anthropic...I've achieved what I wanted to here. I arrived in San Francisco two years ago, having wrapped up my PhD and wanting to contribute to AI safety.”
He reflected on the difficulty of aligning values with action within organisations.
“Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” Sharma wrote. “I’ve seen this within myself, within the organisation, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too.”
Sharma’s departure adds to a broader pattern of AI researchers raising concerns about values and ethics within large technology companies. In 2020, AI researcher Timnit Gebru left Google following a dispute over her work on bias in AI systems and later founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.
Sharma also said his work at the company included “understanding AI sycophancy and its causes; developing defences to reduce risks from AI-assisted bioterrorism; actually putting those defences into production; and writing one of the first AI safety cases.”
Sharma completed his doctoral studies in machine learning at the University of Oxford and holds a master’s degree in the same field from the University of Cambridge.
Despite expressing pride in his work, Sharma said he felt compelled to move on.
“I continuously find myself 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,” he wrote. “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 said he now feels “called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves,” adding that he wants to place “poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing.”
He said he hopes “to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.”
Sharma quoted poets including Rainer Maria Rilke and William Stafford, signing off with Stafford’s poem The Way It Is. In a separate post, he said he plans to move back to the United Kingdom and “let myself become invisible for a period of time.”
Some figures in the technology industry have responded to Sharma’s post, including former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who reshared it.
