Neel Nanda's Shortform

In response to Habryka's shortform [LW(p) · GW(p)], I can confirm that I signed a concealed non-disparagement as part of my Anthropic separation agreement. I worked there for 6 months and left in mid 2022. I received a cash payment as part of that agreement, with nothing shady going on a la threatening previous compensation (though I had no equity to threaten). In hindsight I undervalued my ability to speak freely, and didn't more seriously consider that I could just decline to sign the separation agreement and walk away, I'm not sure what I would do if doing it again.

I asked Anthropic to release me from this after the comment thread started, and they have now released me from both the non-disparagement clause, and the non-disclosure part, which was very nice of them - I would encourage anyone in a similar situation to reach out to hr[at]anthropic.com and legal[at]anthropic.com, though obviously can't guarantee that they'll release everyone. Feel free to DM or email for advice if you're in a similar situation.

I'll take advantage of my newfound freedoms to say that...

Idk, I don't really have anything too disparaging to say (though I dislike the use of concealed non-disparagements in general and am glad they say they're stopping!). I'm broadly a fan of Anthropic, think their heart is likely in the right place and they're trying to do what's best for the world (though could easily be making the wrong calls) and would seriously consider returning in the right circumstances. I've recommended that several friends of mine accept offers to do safety and interp work there, and feel good about this (though would feel much more hesitant about recommending someone joins a pure capabilities team there). My biggest critique is that I have concerns about their willingness to push the capabilities frontier and worsen race dynamics and, while I can imagine reasonable justifications, I think they're under valuing the importance of at least having clear public positions and rationales for this kind of thing and their clear shift in policies since Claude 1.0

EDIT: An additional detail that I genuinely appreciate is that Anthropic paid for me to have an independent lawyer to help explain the separation agreement and negotiate some changes on my behalf (I didn't push back on the concealed non-disparagement, but did alter some other parts). They recommended an independent lawyer, who I used, but were also happy to pay for a lawyer of my choice. As far as I'm aware, this was quite a non-standard thing for a company to do, and I appreciate it and think this was good and ethical in a way that wasn't obligatory.

EDIT 2: Someone asked that I share the terms of the agreement.

The non-disparagement clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff, which I don't think was disparaging or untrue, but to be safe], each party agrees that it will not make or publish or cause to be made or published any disparaging or untrue remark about the other party or, as the case may be, its directors, officers or employees. However, nothing in this clause or agreement will prevent any party to this agreement from (i) making a protected disclosure pursuant to Part IVA of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and/or (ii) reporting a criminal offence to any law enforcement agency and/or a regulatory breach to a regulatory authority and/or participating in any investigation or proceedings in either respect.

The non-disclosure clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff] and 7 [about what kind of references Anthropic could provide for me], both Parties agree to keep the terms and existence of this agreement and the circumstances leading up to the termination of the Consultant's engagement and the completion of this agreement confidential save as [a bunch of legal boilerplate, and two bounded exceptions I asked for but would rather not publicly share. I don't think these change anything, but feel free to DM if you want to know]

A tip for anyone on the ML job/PhD market - people will plausibly be quickly skimming your google scholar to get a sense of "how impressive is this person/what is their deal" read (I do this fairly often), so I recommend polishing your Google scholar if you have publications! It can make a big difference.

I have a lot of weird citable artefacts that confuse Google Scholar, so here's some tips I've picked up:

• First, make a google scholar profile if you don't already have one!
  • Verify the email (otherwise it doesn't show up properly in search)
• (Important!) If you are co-first author on a paper but not in the first position, indicate this by editing the names of all co-first authors to end in a *
  • You edit by logging in to the google account you made the profile with, going to your profile, clicking on the paper's name, and then editing the author's names
  • Co-first vs second author makes a big difference to how impressive a paper is, so you really want this to be clear!
• Edit the venue of your work to be the most impressive place it was published, and include any notable awards from the venue (eg spotlight, oral, paper awards, etc).
  • You can edit this by clicking on the paper name and editing the journal field.
  • If it was a workshop, make sure you include the word workshop (otherwise it can appear deceptive).
  • See my profile for examples.
• Hunt for lost citations: Often papers have weirdly formatted citations and Google scholar gets confused and thinks it was a different paper. You can often find these by clicking on the plus just below your profile picture then add articles, and then clicking through the pages for anything that you wrote. Add all these papers, and then use the merge function to combine them into one paper (with a combined citation count).
  • Merge lets you choose which of the merged artefacts gets displayed
  • Merge = return to the main page, click the tick box next to the paper titles, then clicking merge at the top
  • Similar advice applies if you have eg a blog post that was later turned into a paper, and have citations for both
  • Another merging hack, if you have a weird artefact on your google scholar (eg a blog post or library) and you don't like how Google scholar thinks it should be presented, you can manually add the citation in the format you like, and then merge this with the existing citation, and display your new one
• If you're putting citations on a CV, semantic scholar is typically better for numbers, as it updates more frequently than Google scholar. Though it's worse at picking up on the existence of non paper artefacts like a cited Github or blog post
• Make your affiliation/title up to date at the top