GoodFire has recently received negative Twitter attention for the non-disparagement agreements their employees signed (examples: 1, 2, 3). This echoes previous controversy at Anthropic.
Although I do not have a strong understanding of the issues at play, having these agreements generally seems bad and at the very least, organizations should be transparent about what agreements they have employees sign.
Other AI safety orgs should publicly state if they have these agreements and not wait until they are pressured to comment on them. I would also find it helpful if orgs announced if they do not have these agreements because it is hard to tell how standard this has become.
I have not (to my knowledge and memory) signed a non-disparagement agreement with Palisade or with Survival and Flourishing Corp (the organization that runs SFF).
I suspect the usual dynamics at companies is that when others start doing something, you better start doing it too, or it will seem like negligence. For example, if you are a company lawyer, and other companies have NDAs, you better prepare one for your company, too. Because the risks are asymmetric—if you do the same thing everyone else does, and something bad happens, well that’s the cost of doing business; but if you do something different from everyone else, and something bad happens, that makes you seem incompetent.
GoodFire has recently received negative Twitter attention for the non-disparagement agreements their employees signed (examples: 1, 2, 3). This echoes previous controversy at Anthropic.
Although I do not have a strong understanding of the issues at play, having these agreements generally seems bad and at the very least, organizations should be transparent about what agreements they have employees sign.
Other AI safety orgs should publicly state if they have these agreements and not wait until they are pressured to comment on them. I would also find it helpful if orgs announced if they do not have these agreements because it is hard to tell how standard this has become.
I have not (to my knowledge and memory) signed a non-disparagement agreement with Palisade or with Survival and Flourishing Corp (the organization that runs SFF).
why do they do it? surely it’s obvious that the negative press from doing this is worse than the negative press from not doing it?
Perhaps it wasn’t obvious previously.
I suspect the usual dynamics at companies is that when others start doing something, you better start doing it too, or it will seem like negligence. For example, if you are a company lawyer, and other companies have NDAs, you better prepare one for your company, too. Because the risks are asymmetric—if you do the same thing everyone else does, and something bad happens, well that’s the cost of doing business; but if you do something different from everyone else, and something bad happens, that makes you seem incompetent.
They’re standard practice at a lot of the types of firms that AI Safety companies tend to hire from, so it could even just be force of habit tbh.