Early Anthropic member recalls burnout and big ambitions in the AI lab's early days

A former Anthropic employee wrote a Substack post about his several-month stint at the company. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Anthropic's executives raced to build a safe AI — and one former employee said that pursuit left him feeling burned out and disillusioned.

In a lengthy Substack post , Ivan Vendrov, who worked as a member of the AI lab's technical staff from late 2022 to mid-2023, described an intense workplace, where fears of AI catastrophe clashed with the urge to build safe AGI for commercial use.

Vendrov began the post by saying his account should not be taken as gospel.…