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dgellow 5 hours ago [-]
> One applicant — who spoke to Axios on the condition of anonymity for fear of hurting future job opportunities — recalled being asked how they would feel if the company someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons, and that decision sent the stock to zero.
Is that a scoop? I thought that was a well known thing with Anthropic interview process. They were very transparent about it beforehand from what I remember.
On HN I’ve said things very critical of the company but that’s really not one of them, overall they had a pretty good (but intense and time consuming) interview process. I don’t understand the value of that article
hresvelgr 5 hours ago [-]
I wasn't aware this was known information, but had I not, I would have assumed this was some 4D PR manoeuvre.
conception 4 hours ago [-]
It’s becoming trendy to hate on Anthropic these days but their AI security record speaks for itself for years. Every AI safety benchmark/paper I’ve seen since sonnet became viable placed them far ahead of all other providers - marketing ploy or not (ala Apple “privacy” focus) the company has always had as part of their DNA thus far.
15155 4 hours ago [-]
This paternalistic "safety" "DNA" is ultimately just marketing and a market capture strategy.
1) Propagandize the "dangers" of AI, stage a few incidents, talk up the risks ("it bypassed our most stringent checks! it's so smart!")
2) Build some thin veneer of "safety" and industry "self-policing."
3) Lobby for AI safety "regulation" - which you've conveniently already got an answer to! Be sure to make the regulations expensive, onerous, and impossible for foreign organizations to comply with.
4) Profit.
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t think so, I think Amodei and the early employees do believe what they say. It’s still worth criticizing but I don’t think it’s as simple as „just marketing“. But with the company growing and their insane valuation it’s clear it’s morphing into something else
15155 4 hours ago [-]
Talk is cheap.
Sam Bankman-Fried was a loudly vocal proponent of Effective Altruism.
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
If you look at Amodei writing and publishing before Anthropic he was already a true believer, he seems to be ideologically driven. That doesn’t mean it’s good though, I’m very suspicious of Anthropic leadership, and they have pretty much everything they need to develop a cult following, making them dangerous
notnullorvoid 4 hours ago [-]
It would be a decent interview question if such a large portion of compensation did not come from equity.
Otherwise it's basically the same as asking how someone would feel if all the sudden they lost 50% or more of their wealth. No one feels okay about that, except maybe the delusional few.
jefftk 4 hours ago [-]
Personally I'd trade 50% of my wealth for a significantly large decrease in the chance that AI gets us all killed.
notnullorvoid 3 hours ago [-]
And you'd be okay with Anthropic being the ones that determine what "significantly large" means?
15155 4 hours ago [-]
The issue is that Anthropic is just one company and China doesn't care in the slightest - so it's an entirely moot point and almost narcissistic (on Anthropic's part) to believe that they can have any impact whatsoever on this situation.
jefftk 4 hours ago [-]
This is why I don't expect Anthropic to stop, and so I don't expect the value of the company to go to zero.
But the question is conditional on them deciding to, which (to the extent you trust Anthropic leadership which they're probably also filtering for in interviews) is conditional on believing that a decision that sent their stock to 0 would have a real impact.
dgellow 4 hours ago [-]
The irony is of course that China is going so fast because of Anthropic, by diluting their models and learning from them. would make for a fantastic Greek tragedy if we weren’t talking about something that impacts the entire world economy and societies
bonsai_bar 4 hours ago [-]
Funny how people still consider China to be the party who doesn't care about safety.
15155 4 hours ago [-]
Have you ever actually seen the inside of most Chinese manufacturing operations? The lack of PPE is astonishing. The lack of safety interlocks, protective features, etc. on their equipment is equally incredible. Safety simply isn't a cultural goal.
Spend 5 minutes with DeepSeek, spend 5 minutes with Fable, see how many rejections you get with DeepSeek for the exact same prompts. Sure, if you engineer some nuclear/biological/WMD prompt, they might block it, but they won't reason to do so.
15155 4 hours ago [-]
This reads to me like an "exploitability" metric more than anything.
405error 4 hours ago [-]
I don't agree with some things Anthropic does but that is a cool thing.
nisegami 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't the obvious response that they should offer a comparable comp package without any sort of stock aspect?
notnullorvoid 4 hours ago [-]
In my experience hype driven companies are very resistant to that even when equity/cash ratio offered is more sane.
Oarch 5 hours ago [-]
"anonymity, for fear of hurting future job opportunities"
Ah yes, this screams morality. We're in good hands, folks!
mwigdahl 4 hours ago [-]
Nothing said that this candidate was actually hired by Anthropic, just that he or she applied.
_fat_santa 57 minutes ago [-]
TBH I find it very out of touch to ask that kind of a question. Among regular people, everyone works for money. I consider myself a "mission" driven person but that "mission" is 4th of 5th on the list of reasons to join a company. Reason number 1 has always and will always be getting money in the door to support my family.
HelloUsername 4 hours ago [-]
"Damn kids today, working for their money, not mine!" Since Dario believes in the mission, he should give away all his stock and work for a regular employee salary
dude250711 4 hours ago [-]
But what if someone else ends up making the world a better place better than they do?
FL410 3 hours ago [-]
Based on Opus 5, I can only conclude they've activated their plan to drive the stock price to 0
neilv 4 hours ago [-]
Or it could be posturing. Or it could be compensation negotiation.
How does the actual Anthropic internal culture compare to that of OpenAI?
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the problem with this question. I could barely discern the question in the article.
snapcaster 5 hours ago [-]
I hate these types of questions because they're not just selecting for people dedicated to the mission, they're also selecting for people who are convincing liars
brookst 5 hours ago [-]
What’s the alternative? Selecting people without caring at all about their character?
kypro 4 hours ago [-]
I agree with the parent commenter – it's too on the nose.
If you were concerned about someone's character then you need to ask questions which really help you to understand who the person is – not questions which are easy to game by lying.
I'd argue asking something like someone's opinion on veganism is a better question because it might help you understand how the person thinks about the types of harms Anthropic are concerned about without being such an easy thing to lie about.
Obviously they could say "yeah, I think veganism is good", but someone who actually inhabited that view or was just conflicted about balancing meat consumption and the suffering of animals would probably answer with a lot more nuance that helps you understand how that person thinks about similar kinds of ethical concerns.
t3netet 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't mostly any question not directly verifiable subject to that?
At least the more questions you ask a liar to pin them down the easier it is to eventually notice them tripping up.
greatgib 4 hours ago [-]
The worst is that I don't believe a single second that Amodei and his crew are not greed motivated in the end. Otherwise his company would be a lot different, more open, more open source, more available to help good cause without benefit.
What I see is more the god syndrome of persons that have are in power and have an edge. He can make the conditions so it is important for him to appear as a "divine leader", that is capable to "inspire others" with whatever is the right thing that it decides.
I'm quite sure that he will not tolerate debate still.
But obviously he will not see himself like that, but will be persuaded that he is a world changer and saving the world.
joshribakoff 4 hours ago [-]
When he goes on TV and claims the models may be conscious or may automate 90% of SWE in 6 months it is designed to pump the stock price. Its ironic they hold a fictitious scenario over candidates heads like “would you still keep working here if our revenue were $0 and we cant make payroll” (the realistic scenario where the stock price literally drops to $0)
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
Presumably you're also greed motivated, because you don't work without benefit.
15155 4 hours ago [-]
The difference is that most people don't make "Look at how altruistic we are! We care™" a key component of their marketing pitch.
damontal 2 hours ago [-]
How does that diminish the observation about Amodei?
DiscourseFan 3 hours ago [-]
Anthropic’s issue is that their concern for ethics constitutes a wall. They do not want to accept the potentiality of these tools, and somehow believe that a self-defeating stance will do less harm, even as these powers become more and more available to a larger section of the population. This inversely justifies their ownership stakes since they only benefit themselves under the guise of potential self-sacrifice that would be pathetic if it ever actually happened.
The market functions only on account of the law, which binds its activity and ensures the trustworthiness of the actors within it, and thus ethical practices are already assumed by the entities that operate in the market as the condition of their operation (since if the law is unethical than it’s also unjust and therefore illegitimate; such is the frequent judgement of those who live under it). Anthropic has committed the sin of conflating this principle with what is best for society, or humanity more broadly. What would be best for humanity is unlimited and absolute power over any and all external forces. The law, and the ethics which are presupposed within it, imposes external force on humanity—it cannot be best for humanity, demonstrably. And what is worse is, market advantage only appears when some (relatively small) increase in power is offered from some good or service, so something that fundamentally goes beyond the force of the law and perhaps even breaks it at the level of its intelligibility. The market is at odds with its own condition of possibility, it is internally contradictory, and attempts to reconcile this contradiction only lead to delusional behavior and appear fundamentally in the structure of the commodities which are produced for the sake of the market. What is worst is to thus be an idealist about the ethical nature of the market (“would you be ok with your shares going to 0 because we don’t want to be unethical”) rather than be an idealist about the potentiality of human power, which cannot be limited by the market if it seeks its own absolute expression.
owenmarshall 4 hours ago [-]
Earning a livelihood under the constraints of capitalism is hardly the same as hoarding wealth.
philipallstar 2 hours ago [-]
> under the constraints of capitalism
What does this mean? Was life better in soviet Russia under Communism, or as a serf in feudal England?
> hoarding wealth
The claim was that they were motivated by greed because they weren't doing things for zero benefit. My challenge was that it's normal to do things for pay and it shouldn't be evidence of being motivated by greed.
danaris 2 hours ago [-]
It means we live in a world (especially in the US) where if you aren't earning money, you die within months. Unless you are one of the tiny fraction of people who have enough wealth to live without an earned income—like the heads of all the LLM companies are.
Anyone who has enough wealth to maintain roughly their current standard of living for the rest of their life, and still works in a job with a 6+ figure compensation, is doing it out of greed.
cyanydeez 5 hours ago [-]
"Will you lie to get this job?"
Sounds like theyre actively hiring people to train the worst kind of AI
v9v 5 hours ago [-]
Is it that inconceivable to think that there are people who would be ok with stopping what they're doing when they realize it's harmful?
NitpickLawyer 4 hours ago [-]
I think what's inconceivable is that anyone thinks that these kinds of questions really work. The intersection of high-skilled people that can work there with low-awareness people that can't navigate these questions in a "politically correct" (for lack of a better term) way must be near 0.
"Oh, of course I wouldn't mind stopping if we decide that something is too dangerous to pursue. I think the mere fact that we'd get close to knowing how to do it would satisfy my curiosity. Plus, if we'd be close to it, I'd probably take some time to spend with my loved ones, as the competition would likely be close as well."
It's not hard to see these kinds of questions as more than kabuki theatre. I'd put them in the same vein as those "do you intend to perform any terrorists acts while in our country" questions you get while travelling.
notnullorvoid 4 hours ago [-]
No that is not inconceivable. What is inconceivable is believing that group of individuals is not a small minority, and the question will filter everyone else out.
axus 5 hours ago [-]
The question won't distinguish between both types of people, except for the bad liars.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
We've known about global warming for 40 years. Please point to the industry, billionaire and other "people" who are stopping atm?
Traster 4 hours ago [-]
This is such a good example of a straight forward question that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose. What do we want? Highly ethical people that are mission focused and willing to give up on economic upside for the mission. What are we going to get? Sociopaths who are perfectly happy lying to your face about their intentions, or sycophants who are going to tell you what you want to hear.
Do you know who has the best answer to a moral quandry they've had to navigate during their career? Liars! That's a really difficult question to answer if you're honest, it's a really easy question to answer if you're dishonest.
If you really want to pursue this strategy rather than setting up bullshit interview questions you could do something much more straight forward. Agree some standard of living that's acceptable for your employees - let's say 250k in the bay area. Give them that as cash comp, and everything else goes into a "fund" which gets paid out when specific milestones are achieved, as judged by some panel. Cure cancer? You all get 10% of your deferred comp.
If you want your employees to be prioritizing things other than stock price you can literally just encode that into your compensation strategy if you like!
Obviously no one would do that, because they don't actually want to give up the comp.
DiscourseFan 3 hours ago [-]
Also that would open you up to lawsuits galore, since “curing cancer” is not easily definable, but share price is.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
The candidates should read up on effective altruism before applying to this company.
If you don’t know what that is, then you won’t understand why Anthropic are asking those sort of questions.
Arubis 5 hours ago [-]
This is good advice. And if you don’t want to spend too much time reading about EA, imagine for yourself the inner dialogue of someone struggling with the tension between wanting to get really, really rich at any cost, and also really, really wanting other people to cherish them as a heroic-level Good Person, and also (this part is crucial) not have to sully their hands doing any actual hands-on good directly.
The ideal runs close to the output of Bill Gates’ PR machine.
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
Shame that machine didn't manage to erase Epstein's emails.
Arubis 2 hours ago [-]
> EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS STAYS HAPPENED.
> “What kind of philosophy is that?”
> THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.
— Thief of Time (Pratchett)
the_sleaze_ 4 hours ago [-]
Why are you so anti-anthropic? Hundreds of posts on hacker news decrying anthropic.
Der_Einzige 5 hours ago [-]
Admit it HN, you have sour grapes for not having a job at Anthropic/OpenAI.
ofjcihen 4 hours ago [-]
I was curious until I knew someone who worked for them. I can tell you that you couldn’t pay me enough now.
lombak 4 hours ago [-]
I have no clue how to get my resume past their Claude ATS so it's kind of moot.
notnullorvoid 3 hours ago [-]
Yes I want so badly to work at Antropic.
- 50% or more of my compensation locked up with what I believe has a less than 5% chance of keeping significant value
- Work with engineers who believe there job now is to vibe out a code editor, and have no idea how to fix it's many issues
- Work for a man who lives to fear monger and fain altruism
Is that a scoop? I thought that was a well known thing with Anthropic interview process. They were very transparent about it beforehand from what I remember.
On HN I’ve said things very critical of the company but that’s really not one of them, overall they had a pretty good (but intense and time consuming) interview process. I don’t understand the value of that article
1) Propagandize the "dangers" of AI, stage a few incidents, talk up the risks ("it bypassed our most stringent checks! it's so smart!")
2) Build some thin veneer of "safety" and industry "self-policing."
3) Lobby for AI safety "regulation" - which you've conveniently already got an answer to! Be sure to make the regulations expensive, onerous, and impossible for foreign organizations to comply with.
4) Profit.
Sam Bankman-Fried was a loudly vocal proponent of Effective Altruism.
Otherwise it's basically the same as asking how someone would feel if all the sudden they lost 50% or more of their wealth. No one feels okay about that, except maybe the delusional few.
But the question is conditional on them deciding to, which (to the extent you trust Anthropic leadership which they're probably also filtering for in interviews) is conditional on believing that a decision that sent their stock to 0 would have a real impact.
Spend 5 minutes with DeepSeek, spend 5 minutes with Fable, see how many rejections you get with DeepSeek for the exact same prompts. Sure, if you engineer some nuclear/biological/WMD prompt, they might block it, but they won't reason to do so.
Ah yes, this screams morality. We're in good hands, folks!
How does the actual Anthropic internal culture compare to that of OpenAI?
If you were concerned about someone's character then you need to ask questions which really help you to understand who the person is – not questions which are easy to game by lying.
I'd argue asking something like someone's opinion on veganism is a better question because it might help you understand how the person thinks about the types of harms Anthropic are concerned about without being such an easy thing to lie about.
Obviously they could say "yeah, I think veganism is good", but someone who actually inhabited that view or was just conflicted about balancing meat consumption and the suffering of animals would probably answer with a lot more nuance that helps you understand how that person thinks about similar kinds of ethical concerns.
What I see is more the god syndrome of persons that have are in power and have an edge. He can make the conditions so it is important for him to appear as a "divine leader", that is capable to "inspire others" with whatever is the right thing that it decides. I'm quite sure that he will not tolerate debate still.
But obviously he will not see himself like that, but will be persuaded that he is a world changer and saving the world.
The market functions only on account of the law, which binds its activity and ensures the trustworthiness of the actors within it, and thus ethical practices are already assumed by the entities that operate in the market as the condition of their operation (since if the law is unethical than it’s also unjust and therefore illegitimate; such is the frequent judgement of those who live under it). Anthropic has committed the sin of conflating this principle with what is best for society, or humanity more broadly. What would be best for humanity is unlimited and absolute power over any and all external forces. The law, and the ethics which are presupposed within it, imposes external force on humanity—it cannot be best for humanity, demonstrably. And what is worse is, market advantage only appears when some (relatively small) increase in power is offered from some good or service, so something that fundamentally goes beyond the force of the law and perhaps even breaks it at the level of its intelligibility. The market is at odds with its own condition of possibility, it is internally contradictory, and attempts to reconcile this contradiction only lead to delusional behavior and appear fundamentally in the structure of the commodities which are produced for the sake of the market. What is worst is to thus be an idealist about the ethical nature of the market (“would you be ok with your shares going to 0 because we don’t want to be unethical”) rather than be an idealist about the potentiality of human power, which cannot be limited by the market if it seeks its own absolute expression.
What does this mean? Was life better in soviet Russia under Communism, or as a serf in feudal England?
> hoarding wealth
The claim was that they were motivated by greed because they weren't doing things for zero benefit. My challenge was that it's normal to do things for pay and it shouldn't be evidence of being motivated by greed.
Anyone who has enough wealth to maintain roughly their current standard of living for the rest of their life, and still works in a job with a 6+ figure compensation, is doing it out of greed.
Sounds like theyre actively hiring people to train the worst kind of AI
"Oh, of course I wouldn't mind stopping if we decide that something is too dangerous to pursue. I think the mere fact that we'd get close to knowing how to do it would satisfy my curiosity. Plus, if we'd be close to it, I'd probably take some time to spend with my loved ones, as the competition would likely be close as well."
It's not hard to see these kinds of questions as more than kabuki theatre. I'd put them in the same vein as those "do you intend to perform any terrorists acts while in our country" questions you get while travelling.
Do you know who has the best answer to a moral quandry they've had to navigate during their career? Liars! That's a really difficult question to answer if you're honest, it's a really easy question to answer if you're dishonest.
If you really want to pursue this strategy rather than setting up bullshit interview questions you could do something much more straight forward. Agree some standard of living that's acceptable for your employees - let's say 250k in the bay area. Give them that as cash comp, and everything else goes into a "fund" which gets paid out when specific milestones are achieved, as judged by some panel. Cure cancer? You all get 10% of your deferred comp.
If you want your employees to be prioritizing things other than stock price you can literally just encode that into your compensation strategy if you like!
Obviously no one would do that, because they don't actually want to give up the comp.
If you don’t know what that is, then you won’t understand why Anthropic are asking those sort of questions.
The ideal runs close to the output of Bill Gates’ PR machine.
> “What kind of philosophy is that?”
> THE ONLY ONE THAT WORKS.
— Thief of Time (Pratchett)
- 50% or more of my compensation locked up with what I believe has a less than 5% chance of keeping significant value
- Work with engineers who believe there job now is to vibe out a code editor, and have no idea how to fix it's many issues
- Work for a man who lives to fear monger and fain altruism
No... No I think I'd rather not actually.