Nathan Calvin
I am a big fan of both Andy Hall and Alan Rozenshtein work and public commentary on AI. I am sure that they will continue to do important work as part of this new team at Anthropic, and sincerely congratulate them on what I am sure is an exciting next step for them personally. At the same time, I think both of them going into Anthropic is emblematic of a broader trend of the frontier AI companies grabbing up a truly remarkable number of previously independent voices and thinkers in AI. When massive events happen in AI - e.g. the DOW <> Ant conflict - the public, media, and elected officials will be looking for independent commentary and analysis from thinkers who are not at the frontier labs. The number of folks they can go to for that sort of independent commentary seems like it is going down precipitously. This seems like a real problem, and worth thinking more systemically about how we can create sufficiently attractive positions outside of companies - e.g. at independent nonprofits, in government - to attract the sorts of folks like Andy and Alan who are going into Anthropic. Anyway, each of these decisions individually is reasonable and not worth overly fixating on, and I do believe that both of them will do good work as part of this team (and have access to novel information that will help them do research) but zooming out I am worried that we are losing independent voices at the exact time we need more of them not fewer.
Matthew Botvinick
Wonderful to have Andy Hall (@ahall_research) joining as a founding member of our new team at @AnthropicAI, working on AI and the rule of law. Few people have done such original and illuminating work on the impact of AI on political life. If you don't already read his Free Systems Substack, you should start. Together with Alan Rozenshtein (@ARozenshtein) and Justin Curl (@curl_justin), that's a dream team.