Anthropic safeguards research lead Mrinank Sharma resigns, says 'the world is in peril'

Mrinank Sharma, who led the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic, has resigned from the San Francisco AI company. He gave 9 February 2026 as his last working day. In a two-page letter posted on X, he wrote that “the world is in peril” and said he had seen pressure inside Anthropic to “set aside what matters most.”

What the letter says

Sharma wrote that the danger was “not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”

He 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.”

The sharpest passage concerns his employer. “Throughout my time here, I have repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote. “I have seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society, too.”

The letter does not name a specific decision or product. Sharma said he enjoyed his time at the company and that “the time has come to move on.” He said he plans to pursue a poetry degree and writing. In a reply on X, he said he would move back to the UK and let himself “become invisible for a period of time.”

His work at Anthropic

Firstpost reported that Sharma joined Anthropic in 2023 and holds a DPhil in machine learning from the University of Oxford. In the letter, as reported by the BBC, he listed his contributions. They included investigating why generative AI systems flatter users, work against AI-assisted bioterrorism risks, and research into “how AI assistants could make us less human.” Firstpost said his team’s work also covered jailbreak defenses and monitoring of AI misuse.

A safety-first brand under scrutiny

Early OpenAI employees founded Anthropic in 2021. The company describes itself as a “public benefit corporation dedicated to securing [AI’s] benefits and mitigating its risks.” It has published reports on the safety of its own products. One of them said hackers had “weaponised” its technology to carry out cyber attacks.

The company has also faced legal challenges. In 2025 it agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class action brought by authors who said it used their work without permission to train its models.

The BBC reported that Sharma’s departure came the same week as a resignation at OpenAI. Former OpenAI researcher Zoe Hitzig told BBC Newsnight she quit partly over the company’s decision to show adverts in ChatGPT. Anthropic had recently run commercials criticising that move.

Firstpost reported that the resignation also followed Anthropic’s release of new tools designed to automate work tasks across industries.

What is at stake

Safeguards research is the work meant to stop AI models from being misused, for example to help build biological weapons. Sharma’s letter is a public statement from the person who led that research. He wrote that Anthropic faces pressures that pull against its stated values. The letter does not say whether any of those pressures changed the company’s safety work.