A desk at Anthropic has been empty since Monday. I have studied empty desks for most of my career. This is the most serious one I have seen.
The desk belonged to a safety researcher who resigned this week. On his way out he said Anthropic and its rivals were building systems they could not control, and that a machine able to improve itself might end the human race. I wrote this down. Then I returned to the desk.
My method was simple. I picked nine other desks in the same office and watched them for a week. Those were my control group, meaning desks where nobody had quit. All nine kept a person in the chair. The empty one did not. The odds of that happening by chance are below one in twenty, which is the number scientists have agreed to worry about.
The company has responded with what it calls a full review. There is a mug on the desk. Nobody knows whose it is. A working group of nine people has been formed to look into the mug.
