I have been around the community for a long time (since before Anthropic existed), in a very involved way, and I had also basically never heard of this before the Claude 3 release.… So… it was definitely not the case that this was just an obvious thing that everyone in the community knew about or that Anthropic senior staff were regularly saying
For the record a different Anthropic staffer told me confidently that it was widespread in 2022, the year before you joined, so I think you’re wrong here.
(The staffer preferred that I not quote them verbatim in public so I’ve DM’d you a direct quote.)
Summarizing from the private conversation: the information there is not new to me and I don’t think your description of what they said is accurate.
As I’ve said previously, Anthropic people certainly went around saying things like “we want to think carefully about when to do releases and try to advance capabilities for the purpose of doing safety”, but it was always extremely clear at least to me that these were not commitments, just general thoughts about strategy, and I am very confident that was what was being referred to as being widespread in 2022 here.
For the record a different Anthropic staffer told me confidently that it was widespread in 2022, the year before you joined, so I think you’re wrong here.
(The staffer preferred that I not quote them verbatim in public so I’ve DM’d you a direct quote.)
Summarizing from the private conversation: the information there is not new to me and I don’t think your description of what they said is accurate.
As I’ve said previously, Anthropic people certainly went around saying things like “we want to think carefully about when to do releases and try to advance capabilities for the purpose of doing safety”, but it was always extremely clear at least to me that these were not commitments, just general thoughts about strategy, and I am very confident that was what was being referred to as being widespread in 2022 here.