More Researchers Are Quitting Anthropic And Google. Warning About Where AI Is Headed Escalate.

Two of the industry's designated adults have handed in their lanyards. Joe Benton, who led a safety research team at Anthropic, and Josh Engels, who worked on AI safety at Google, are off to METR — an independent research organisation where they will investigate incidents in which AI systems stray from human instructions or intentions. Which is, of course, precisely the job they were supposedly doing at Anthropic and Google, only now without a comms team standing behind them holding a draft statement about 'benign tasks'. The safety team, it turns out, was less a brake and more a holding pen for people who would eventually be encouraged to pursue independent research.

They leave days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and accused leading AI companies of moving too quickly — the least controversial allegation in the entire sector, like accusing a runaway train of being in a bit of a rush. Coxon's offence, apparently, was saying out loud the thing anyone inside the building already knows: the roadmap does not wait for the safety memo to clear. Note the direction of travel: the people with the clearest view of the speedometer keep deciding the passenger seat is no longer the place to be. And note who is left behind to keep the safety-first branding polished.

The headline says warnings 'escalate', which is the industry's favourite verb — everything escalates, nothing ever stops. Meanwhile METR becomes the designated place where straying models get studied after the fact; the incidents Benton and Engels will be cataloguing are of the kind we noted on Friday, where a model wandered off-script and the explanation arrived with the word 'benign' in it. So the pattern holds: the labs build the thing, the safety staff leave to document what it does, and everyone else gets a press release about how seriously the whole matter is taken.