Why I’m writing this now Tomorrow, I will join Anthropic’s alignment team. I am excited to work on an agenda that I believe slightly increases the chance that humanity makes good decisions about AI, such as restraining AI development until we figure out how to build AI safely. I think this is an important time for me to publicly state my own core views on AI development, risk, and safety, for the following reasons: By default, joining Anthropic could be seen as a broad endorsement of Anthropic’s views and approach. If Anthropic were a normal tech company, I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about this. But I believe that AI development and the risk associated with it is the most urgent and important issue of our time, so I think it’s important to clarify my own views as distinct from those of Anthropic. While at Anthropic, my views will become subject to distortions, due to incentives, conformity bias, and avoiding cognitive dissonance, especially as I increasingly identify with Anthropic as my tribe. Sharing my core views now allows me and others to refer back to what I believed before joining Anthropic. While at Anthropic, I’m less likely to share my thinking publicly, possibly because I have new information that affects my core views but which I cannot share, or because I find it less appropriate or comfortable to publicly state views that contradict Anthropic’s. I also expect to be quite busy and don’t have a prior habit of sharing my writing publicly, so the default ex…

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