Mrinank Sharma: AI expert walks away from Anthropic, reveals surprising reason

In a cryptic note shared on X, Sharma did not mention burnout or a new job offer as reasons for leaving.

He wrote: “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.”

Sharma added, “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.” He reflected on his time at Anthropic, noting the difficulty of truly letting values guide actions.

Education and Career

Sharma holds a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford.

Reflecting on his work at Anthropic, Sharma said: “I've decided to leave Anthropic… I've achieved what I wanted here. I arrived in San Francisco two years ago, having wrapped up my PhD and wanting to contribute to AI safety. I feel lucky to have contributed to understanding AI sycophancy and its causes, developing defenses to reduce AI-assisted bioterrorism risks, putting those defenses into production, and writing one of the first AI safety cases.”

Warning from Anthropic CEO

The techie quit the job at a time Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to transform the tech landscape, with some experts warning that highly technical roles may soon become largely automated.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, highlighted the trend at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it,” he said.

Amodei further cautioned about the pace of change in software engineering: “I think… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what software engineers do end-to-end. Then it’s a question of how fast that loop closes.”