mrinank sharma

previously head of AI safety @ anthropic.

resignation letter on feb, 2026 citing david j. temple and rob burbea.

from mrinank sharma + co-authors on values/AI risks in their paper: Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage

excerpts on values, authenticity, and the death of our humanity:

"Values and authenticity. Alignment with one’s values is at the heart of situational empowerment. To clarify, by values, we do not mean shallow preferences that operate only in specific instances, but deeper guiding principles that transcend particular situations and consistently shape evaluations of behavior and circumstances, following Schwartz (2012)."
Schwartz, S. H. An overview of the schwartz theory of basic values. Online readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1):11, 2012

"We take the view that values are inherently personal and participatory (Burbea, 2019a;b)"
Burbea, R. Sila and soul, part 1. https://hermesamara.org/resources/talk/2019-06-09-sila-and-soul-part-1, 2019a. Accessed: 2025-11-12.
Burbea, R. Sila and soul, part 7. https://hermesamara.org/resources/talk/2019-06-15-sila-and-soul-part-7, 2019b. Accessed: 2025-11-12.

"This is consistent with Rogers (1961)’s approach to psychotherapy, which emphasizes restoring individuals’ capacity to sense into and act in alignment with their own values."
Rogers, C. R. On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961.

"As such, an AI that substitutes its own value judgments for the user’s, however well-intentioned, risks disempowering them. Taken to an extreme, if humans make inauthentic value judgments and take inauthentic actions, they might be reduced to “substrates” through which AI lives, which itself is a form of existential risk that Temple (2024) termed “the death of our humanity.”"
Temple, D. J. First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come. Amplify Publishing Group, USA, 2024. Softcover edition.