I am confident, on the basis of private information I can’t share, that Anthropic has asked at least some employees to sign similar non-disparagement agreements that are covered by non-disclosure agreements as OpenAI did.
Or to put things into more plain terms:
I am confident that Anthropic has offered at least one employee significant financial incentive to promise to never say anything bad about Anthropic, or anything that might negatively affects its business, and to never tell anyone about their commitment to do so.
I am not aware of Anthropic doing anything like withholding vested equity the way OpenAI did, though I think the effect on discourse is similarly bad.
I of course think this is quite sad and a bad thing for a leading AI capability company to do, especially one that bills itself on being held accountable by its employees and that claims to prioritize safety in its plans.
As a point of clarification: is it correct that the first quoted statement above should be read as “at least one employee” in line with the second quoted statement? (When I first read it, I parsed it as “all employees” which was very confusing since I carefully read my contract both before signing and a few days ago (before posting this comment) and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything like this in there.)
(I’m a full-time employee at Anthropic.)
I carefully read my contract both before signing and a few days ago [...] there wasn’t anything like this in there.
Current employees of OpenAI also wouldn’t yet have signed or even known about the non-disparagement agreement that is part of “general release” paperwork on leaving the company. So this is only evidence about some ways this could work at Anthropic, not others.
I am disappointed. Using nondisparagement agreements seems bad to me, especially if they’re covered by non-disclosure agreements, especially if you don’t announce that you might use this.
My ask-for-Anthropic now is to explain the contexts in which they have asked or might ask people to incur nondisparagement obligations, and if those are bad, release people and change policy accordingly. And even if nondisparagement obligations can be reasonable, I fail to imagine how non-disclosure obligations covering them could be reasonable, so I think Anthropic should at least do away with the no-disclosure-of-nondisparagement obligations.
Neither is Daniel Kokotajlo. Context and wording strongly suggest that what you mean is that you weren’t ever offered paperwork with such an agreement and incentives to sign it, but there remains a slight ambiguity on this crucial detail.
I am including both in this reference class (i.e. when I say employee above, it refers to both present employees and employees who left at some point). I am intentionally being broad here to preserve more anonymity of my sources.
I agree that this kind of legal contract is bad, and Anthropic should do better. I think there are a number of aggrevating factors which made the OpenAI situation extrodinarily bad, and I’m not sure how much these might obtain regarding Anthropic (at least one comment from another departing employee about not being offered this kind of contract suggest the practice is less widespread).
-amount of money at stake -taking money, equity or other things the employee believed they already owned if the employee doesn’t sign the contract, vs. offering them something new (IANAL but in some cases, this could be a felony “grand theft wages” under California law if a threat to withhold wages for not signing a contract is actually carried out, what kinds of equity count as wages would be a complex legal question) -is this offered to everyone, or only under circumstances where there’s a reasonable justification? -is this only offered when someone is fired or also when someone resigns? -to what degree are the policies of offering contracts concealed from employees? -if someone asks to obtain legal advice and/or negotiate before signing, does the company allow this? -if this becomes public, does the company try to deflect/minimize/only address issues that are made publically, or do they fix the whole situation? -is this close to “standard practice” (which doesn’t make it right, but makes it at least seem less deliberately malicious), or is it worse than standard practice? -are there carveouts that reduce the scope of the non-disparagement clause (explicitly allow some kinds of speech, overriding the non-disparagement)? -are there substantive concerns that the employee has at the time of signing the contract, that the agreement would prevent discussing? -are there other ways the company could retaliate against an employee/departing employee who challenges the legality of contract?
I think with termination agreements on being fired there’s often 1. some amount of severance offered 2. a clause that says “the terms and monetary amounts of this agreement are confidential” or similar. I don’t know how often this also includes non-disparagement. I expect that most non-disparagement agreements don’t have a term or limits on what is covered.
I think a steelman of this kind of contract is: Suppose you fire someone, believe you have good reasons to fire them, and you think that them loudly talking about how it was unfair that you fired them would unfairly harm your company’s reputation. Then it seems somewhat reasonable to offer someone money in exchange for “don’t complain about being fired”. The person who was fired can then decide whether talking about it is worth more than the money being offered.
However, you could accomplish this with a much more limited contract, ideally one that lets you disclose “I signed a legal agreement in exchange for money to not complain about being fired”, and doesn’t cover cases where “years later, you decide the company is doing the wrong thing based on public information and want to talk about that publically” or similar.
I think it is not in the nature of most corporate lawyers to think about “is this agreement giving me too much power?” and most employees facing such an agreement just sign it without considering negotiating or challenging the terms.
For any future employer, I will ask about their policies for termination contracts before I join (as this is when you have the most leverage, if they give you an offer they want to convince you to join).
Not sure how to interpret the “agree” votes on this comment. If someone is able to share that they agree with the core claim because of object-level evidence, I am interested. (Rather than agreeing with the claim that this state of affairs is “quite sad”.)
(Not answering this question since I think it would leak too many bits on confidential stuff. In general I will be a bit hesitant to answer detailed questions on this, or I might take a long while to think about what to say before I answer, which I recognize is annoying, but I think is the right tradeoff in this situation)
A LOT depends on the details of WHEN the employees make the agreement, and the specifics of duration and remedy, and the (much harder to know) the apparent willingness to enforce on edge cases.
“significant financial incentive to promise” is hugely different from “significant financial loss for choosing not to promise”. MANY companies have such things in their contracts, and they’re a condition of employment. And they’re pretty rarely enforced. That’s a pretty significant incentive, but it’s prior to investment, so it’s nowhere near as bad.
I’m kind of concerned about the ethics of someone signing a contract and then breaking it to anonymously report what’s going on (if that’s what your private source did). I think there’s value from people being able to trust each others’ promises about keeping secrets, and as much as I’m opposed to Anthropic’s activities, I’d nevertheless like to preserve a norm of not breaking promises.
Can you confirm or deny whether your private information comes from someone who was under a contract not to give you that private information? (I completely understand if the answer is no.)
I am confident, on the basis of private information I can’t share, that Anthropic has asked at least some employees to sign similar non-disparagement agreements that are covered by non-disclosure agreements as OpenAI did.
Or to put things into more plain terms:
I am confident that Anthropic has offered at least one employee significant financial incentive to promise to never say anything bad about Anthropic, or anything that might negatively affects its business, and to never tell anyone about their commitment to do so.
I am not aware of Anthropic doing anything like withholding vested equity the way OpenAI did, though I think the effect on discourse is similarly bad.
I of course think this is quite sad and a bad thing for a leading AI capability company to do, especially one that bills itself on being held accountable by its employees and that claims to prioritize safety in its plans.
As a point of clarification: is it correct that the first quoted statement above should be read as “at least one employee” in line with the second quoted statement? (When I first read it, I parsed it as “all employees” which was very confusing since I carefully read my contract both before signing and a few days ago (before posting this comment) and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything like this in there.)
Current employees of OpenAI also wouldn’t yet have signed or even known about the non-disparagement agreement that is part of “general release” paperwork on leaving the company. So this is only evidence about some ways this could work at Anthropic, not others.
Yep, both should be read as “at least one employee”, sorry for the ambiguity in the language.
FWIW I recommend editing OP to clarify this.
Agreed, I think it’s quite confusing as is
Added a “at least some”, which I hope clarifies.
I am disappointed. Using nondisparagement agreements seems bad to me, especially if they’re covered by non-disclosure agreements, especially if you don’t announce that you might use this.
My ask-for-Anthropic now is to explain the contexts in which they have asked or might ask people to incur nondisparagement obligations, and if those are bad, release people and change policy accordingly. And even if nondisparagement obligations can be reasonable, I fail to imagine how non-disclosure obligations covering them could be reasonable, so I think Anthropic should at least do away with the no-disclosure-of-nondisparagement obligations.
Does anyone from Anthropic want to explicitly deny that they are under an agreement like this?
(I know the post talks about some and not necessarily all employees, but am still interested).
I left Anthropic in June 2023 and am not under any such agreement.
EDIT: nor was any such agreement or incentive offered to me.
Neither is Daniel Kokotajlo. Context and wording strongly suggest that what you mean is that you weren’t ever offered paperwork with such an agreement and incentives to sign it, but there remains a slight ambiguity on this crucial detail.
Correct, I was not offered such paperwork nor any incentives to sign it. Edited my post to include this.
I am a current Anthropic employee, and I am not under any such agreement.
If asked to sign a self-concealing NDA or non-disparagement agreement, I would refuse.
Did you see Sam’s comment?
Agreed. I’d be especially interested to hear this from people who have left Anthropic.
In the case of OpenAI most of the debate was about ex-employees. Are we talking about current employees or ex-employees here?
I am including both in this reference class (i.e. when I say employee above, it refers to both present employees and employees who left at some point). I am intentionally being broad here to preserve more anonymity of my sources.
I agree that this kind of legal contract is bad, and Anthropic should do better. I think there are a number of aggrevating factors which made the OpenAI situation extrodinarily bad, and I’m not sure how much these might obtain regarding Anthropic (at least one comment from another departing employee about not being offered this kind of contract suggest the practice is less widespread).
-amount of money at stake
-taking money, equity or other things the employee believed they already owned if the employee doesn’t sign the contract, vs. offering them something new (IANAL but in some cases, this could be a felony “grand theft wages” under California law if a threat to withhold wages for not signing a contract is actually carried out, what kinds of equity count as wages would be a complex legal question)
-is this offered to everyone, or only under circumstances where there’s a reasonable justification?
-is this only offered when someone is fired or also when someone resigns?
-to what degree are the policies of offering contracts concealed from employees?
-if someone asks to obtain legal advice and/or negotiate before signing, does the company allow this?
-if this becomes public, does the company try to deflect/minimize/only address issues that are made publically, or do they fix the whole situation?
-is this close to “standard practice” (which doesn’t make it right, but makes it at least seem less deliberately malicious), or is it worse than standard practice?
-are there carveouts that reduce the scope of the non-disparagement clause (explicitly allow some kinds of speech, overriding the non-disparagement)?
-are there substantive concerns that the employee has at the time of signing the contract, that the agreement would prevent discussing?
-are there other ways the company could retaliate against an employee/departing employee who challenges the legality of contract?
I think with termination agreements on being fired there’s often 1. some amount of severance offered 2. a clause that says “the terms and monetary amounts of this agreement are confidential” or similar. I don’t know how often this also includes non-disparagement. I expect that most non-disparagement agreements don’t have a term or limits on what is covered.
I think a steelman of this kind of contract is: Suppose you fire someone, believe you have good reasons to fire them, and you think that them loudly talking about how it was unfair that you fired them would unfairly harm your company’s reputation. Then it seems somewhat reasonable to offer someone money in exchange for “don’t complain about being fired”. The person who was fired can then decide whether talking about it is worth more than the money being offered.
However, you could accomplish this with a much more limited contract, ideally one that lets you disclose “I signed a legal agreement in exchange for money to not complain about being fired”, and doesn’t cover cases where “years later, you decide the company is doing the wrong thing based on public information and want to talk about that publically” or similar.
I think it is not in the nature of most corporate lawyers to think about “is this agreement giving me too much power?” and most employees facing such an agreement just sign it without considering negotiating or challenging the terms.
For any future employer, I will ask about their policies for termination contracts before I join (as this is when you have the most leverage, if they give you an offer they want to convince you to join).
Not sure how to interpret the “agree” votes on this comment. If someone is able to share that they agree with the core claim because of object-level evidence, I am interested. (Rather than agreeing with the claim that this state of affairs is “quite sad”.)
A pre-existing market on this question https://manifold.markets/causal_agency/does-anthropic-routinely-require-ex?r=SmFjb2JQZmF1
What’s your median-guess for the number of times Anthropic has done this?
(Not answering this question since I think it would leak too many bits on confidential stuff. In general I will be a bit hesitant to answer detailed questions on this, or I might take a long while to think about what to say before I answer, which I recognize is annoying, but I think is the right tradeoff in this situation)
A LOT depends on the details of WHEN the employees make the agreement, and the specifics of duration and remedy, and the (much harder to know) the apparent willingness to enforce on edge cases.
“significant financial incentive to promise” is hugely different from “significant financial loss for choosing not to promise”. MANY companies have such things in their contracts, and they’re a condition of employment. And they’re pretty rarely enforced. That’s a pretty significant incentive, but it’s prior to investment, so it’s nowhere near as bad.
I’m kind of concerned about the ethics of someone signing a contract and then breaking it to anonymously report what’s going on (if that’s what your private source did). I think there’s value from people being able to trust each others’ promises about keeping secrets, and as much as I’m opposed to Anthropic’s activities, I’d nevertheless like to preserve a norm of not breaking promises.
Can you confirm or deny whether your private information comes from someone who was under a contract not to give you that private information? (I completely understand if the answer is no.)
(Not going to answer this question for confidentiality/glommarization reasons)