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)?
OK, let’s imagine I had a concern about RSP noncompliance, and felt that I needed to use this mechanism.
(in reality I’d just post in whichever slack channel seemed most appropriate; this happens occasionally for “just wanted to check...” style concerns and I’m very confident we’d welcome graver reports too. Usually that’d be a public channel; for some compartmentalized stuff it might be a private channel and I’d DM the team lead if I didn’t have access. I think we have good norms and culture around explicitly raising safety concerns and taking them seriously.)
As I understand it, I’d:
Remember that we have such a mechanism and bet that there’s a shortcut link. Fail to remember the shortlink name (reports? violations?) and search the list of “rsp-” links; ah, it’s rsp-noncompliance. (just did this, and added a few aliases)
That lands me on the policy PDF, which explains in two pages the intended scope of the policy, who’s covered, the proceedure, etc. and contains a link to the third-party anonymous reporting platform. That link is publicly accessible, so I could e.g. make a report from a non-work device or even after leaving the company.
I write a report on that platform describing my concerns[1], optionally uploading documents etc. and get a random password so I can log in later to give updates, send and receive messages, etc.
The report by default goes to our Responsible Scaling Officer, currently Sam McCandlish. If I’m concerned about the RSO or don’t trust them to handle it, I can instead escalate to the Board of Directors (current DRI Daniella Amodei)
Investigation and resolution obviously depends on the details of the noncompliance concern.
There are other (pretty standard) escalation pathways for concerns about things that aren’t RSP noncompliance. There’s not much we can do about the “only one person could have made this report” problem beyond the included strong commitments to non-retaliation, but if anyone has suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Good that it’s clear who it goes to, though if I was an anthropic I’d want an option to escalate to a board member who isn’t Dario or Daniella, in case I had concerns related to the CEO
Makes sense—if I felt I had to use an anonymous mechanism, I can see how contacting Daniela about Dario might be uncomfortable. (Although to be clear I actually think that’d be fine, and I’d also have to think that Sam McCandlish as responsible scaling officer wouldn’t handle it)
If I was doing this today I guess I’d email another board member; and I’ll suggest that we add that as an escalation option.
Are there currently board members who are meaningfully separated in terms of incentive-alignment with Daniella or Dario? (I don’t know that it’s possible for you to answer in a way that’d really resolve my concerns, given what sort of information is possible to share. But, “is there an actual way to criticize Dario and/or Daniella in a way that will realistically be given a fair hearing by someone who, if appropriate, could take some kind of action” is a crux of mine)
Absent evidence to the contrary, for any organization one should assume board members were basically selected by the CEO. So hard to get assurance about true independence, but it seems good to at least to talk to someone who isn’t a family member/close friend.
(Jay Kreps was formally selected by the LTBT. I think Yasmin Razavi was selected by the Series C investors. It’s not clear how involved the leadership/Amodeis were in those selections. The three remaining members of the LTBT appear independent, at least on cursory inspection.)
I think that personal incentives is an unhelpful way to try and think about or predict board behavior (for Anthropic and in general), but you can find the current members of our board listed here.
Is there an actual way to criticize Dario and/or Daniela in a way that will realistically be given a fair hearing by someone who, if appropriate, could take some kind of action?
For whom to criticize him/her/them about what? What kind of action are you imagining? For anything I can imagine actually coming up, I’d be personally comfortable raising it directly with either or both of them in person or in writing, and believe they’d give it a fair hearing as well as appropriate follow-up. There are also standard company mechanisms that many people might be more comfortable using (talk to your manager or someone responsible for that area; ask a maybe-anonymous question in various fora; etc). Ultimately executives are accountable to the board, which will be majority appointed by the long-term benefit trust from late this year.
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)?
Anthropic has not published details. See discussion here. (I weakly wish they would; it’s not among my high-priority asks for them.)
OK, let’s imagine I had a concern about RSP noncompliance, and felt that I needed to use this mechanism.
(in reality I’d just post in whichever slack channel seemed most appropriate; this happens occasionally for “just wanted to check...” style concerns and I’m very confident we’d welcome graver reports too. Usually that’d be a public channel; for some compartmentalized stuff it might be a private channel and I’d DM the team lead if I didn’t have access. I think we have good norms and culture around explicitly raising safety concerns and taking them seriously.)
As I understand it, I’d:
Remember that we have such a mechanism and bet that there’s a shortcut link. Fail to remember the shortlink name (reports? violations?) and search the list of “rsp-” links; ah, it’s rsp-noncompliance. (just did this, and added a few aliases)
That lands me on the policy PDF, which explains in two pages the intended scope of the policy, who’s covered, the proceedure, etc. and contains a link to the third-party anonymous reporting platform. That link is publicly accessible, so I could e.g. make a report from a non-work device or even after leaving the company.
I write a report on that platform describing my concerns[1], optionally uploading documents etc. and get a random password so I can log in later to give updates, send and receive messages, etc.
The report by default goes to our Responsible Scaling Officer, currently Sam McCandlish. If I’m concerned about the RSO or don’t trust them to handle it, I can instead escalate to the Board of Directors (current DRI Daniella Amodei)
Investigation and resolution obviously depends on the details of the noncompliance concern.
There are other (pretty standard) escalation pathways for concerns about things that aren’t RSP noncompliance. There’s not much we can do about the “only one person could have made this report” problem beyond the included strong commitments to non-retaliation, but if anyone has suggestions I’d love to hear them.
I clicked through just now to the point of cursor-in-textbox, but not submitting a nuisance report.
Good that it’s clear who it goes to, though if I was an anthropic I’d want an option to escalate to a board member who isn’t Dario or Daniella, in case I had concerns related to the CEO
Makes sense—if I felt I had to use an anonymous mechanism, I can see how contacting Daniela about Dario might be uncomfortable. (Although to be clear I actually think that’d be fine, and I’d also have to think that Sam McCandlish as responsible scaling officer wouldn’t handle it)
If I was doing this today I guess I’d email another board member; and I’ll suggest that we add that as an escalation option.
Are there currently board members who are meaningfully separated in terms of incentive-alignment with Daniella or Dario? (I don’t know that it’s possible for you to answer in a way that’d really resolve my concerns, given what sort of information is possible to share. But, “is there an actual way to criticize Dario and/or Daniella in a way that will realistically be given a fair hearing by someone who, if appropriate, could take some kind of action” is a crux of mine)
Absent evidence to the contrary, for any organization one should assume board members were basically selected by the CEO. So hard to get assurance about true independence, but it seems good to at least to talk to someone who isn’t a family member/close friend.
(Jay Kreps was formally selected by the LTBT. I think Yasmin Razavi was selected by the Series C investors. It’s not clear how involved the leadership/Amodeis were in those selections. The three remaining members of the LTBT appear independent, at least on cursory inspection.)
I think that personal incentives is an unhelpful way to try and think about or predict board behavior (for Anthropic and in general), but you can find the current members of our board listed here.
For whom to criticize him/her/them about what? What kind of action are you imagining? For anything I can imagine actually coming up, I’d be personally comfortable raising it directly with either or both of them in person or in writing, and believe they’d give it a fair hearing as well as appropriate follow-up. There are also standard company mechanisms that many people might be more comfortable using (talk to your manager or someone responsible for that area; ask a maybe-anonymous question in various fora; etc). Ultimately executives are accountable to the board, which will be majority appointed by the long-term benefit trust from late this year.