All of Sam McCandlish's Comments + Replies

Hmm, I feel like you didn't answer my question. Can you confirm that Anthropic has asked at least some employees to sign confidential non-disparagement agreements?

I think your previous comment pretty strongly implied that you think you did not do so (i.e. saying any previous agreements were merely "unclear" I think pretty clearly implies that none of them did include a non-ambiguous confidential non-disparagement agreement). I want to it to be confirmed and on the record that you did, so I am asking you to say so clearly.

This comment appears to respond to habryka, but doesn’t actually address what I took to be his two main points—that Anthropic was using NDAs to cover non-disparagement agreements, and that they were applying significant financial incentive to pressure employees into signing them.

We historically included standard non-disparagement agreements by default in severance agreements

Were these agreements subject to NDA? And were all departing employees asked to sign them, or just some? If the latter, what determined who was asked to sign? 

Anyone who has signed a non-disparagement agreement with Anthropic is free to state that fact (and we regret that some previous agreements were unclear on this point) [emphasis added]

This seems as far as I can tell a straightforward lie? 

I am very confident that the non-disparagement agreements you asked at least one employee to sign were not ambiguous, and very clearly said that the non-disparagement clauses could not be mentioned.

To reiterate what I know to be true: Employees of Anthropic were asked to sign non-disparagement agreements with a commit... (read more)

Note, since this is a new and unverified account, that Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) confirmed on Twitter that the parent comment is the official Anthropic position https://x.com/jackclarkSF/status/1808975582832832973

EDIT: Anthropic have kindly released me personally from my entire concealed non-disparagement, not just made a specific safety exception. Their position on other employees remains unclear, but I take this as a good sign

If someone signed a non-disparagement agreement in the past and wants to raise concerns about safety at Anthropic, we welcome that feedback and will not enforce the non-disparagement agreement.

Thanks for this update! To clarify, are you saying that you WILL enforce existing non disparagements for everything apart from safety, but you are... (read more)

To expand on my "that's a crux": if the non-disparagement+NDA clauses are very standard, such that they were included in a first draft by an attorney without prompting and no employee ever pushed back, then I would think this was somewhat less bad.

It would still be somewhat bad, because Anthropic should be proactive about not making those kinds of mistakes. I am confused about what level of perfection to demand from Anthropic, considering the stakes.

And if non-disparagement is often used, but Anthropic leadership either specified its presence or its form, ... (read more)

And internally, we have an anonymous RSP non-compliance reporting line so that any employee can raise concerns about issues like this without any fear of retaliation.
 

Are you able to elaborate on how this works? Are there any other details about this publicly, couldn't find more detail via a quick search.

Some specific qs I'm curious about: (a) who handles the anonymous complaints, (b) what is the scope of behavior explicitly (and implicitly re: cultural norms) covered here, (c) handling situations where a report would deanonymize the reporter (or limit them to a small number of people)?

Please keep up the pressure on us

OK:

1. You should publicly confirm that your old policy don't meaningfully advance the frontier with a public launch has been replaced by your RSP, if that's true, and otherwise clarify your policy.
2. You take credit for the LTBT (e.g. here) but you haven't published enough to show that it's effective. You should publish the Trust Agreement, clarify these ambiguities, and make accountability-y commitments like if major changes happen to the LTBT we'll quickly tell the public.
3. (Reminder that a year ago you committed to establish a b

Anyone who has signed a non-disparagement agreement with Anthropic is free to state that fact (and we regret that some previous agreements were unclear on this point).

I'm curious as to why it took you (and therefore Anthropic) so long to make it common knowledge (or even public knowledge) that Anthropic used non-disparagement contracts as a standard and was also planning to change its standard agreements.

The right time to reveal this was when the OpenAI non-disparagement news broke, not after Habryka connects the dots and builds social momentum for scrutiny of Anthropic.

Thank you for responding! (I have more comments and questions but figured I would shoot off one quick question which is easy to ask)

We've since recognized that this routine use of non-disparagement agreements, even in these narrow cases, conflicts with our mission

Can you clarify what you mean by "even in these narrow cases"? If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that you were including a non-disparagement clause by default in all of your severance agreements, which sounds like the opposite of narrow (edit: though as Robert points out it depen... (read more)