In response to Habryka's shortform, I can confirm that I signed a concealed non-disparagement as part of my Anthropic separation agreement. I worked there for 6 months and left in mid 2022. I received a cash payment as part of that agreement, with nothing shady going on a la threatening previous compensation (though I had no equity to threaten). In hindsight I undervalued my ability to speak freely, and didn't more seriously consider that I could just decline to sign the separation agreement and walk away, I'm not sure what I would do if doing it again.

I asked Anthropic to release me from this after the comment thread started, and they have now released me from both the non-disparagement clause, and the non-disclosure part, which was very nice of them - I would encourage anyone in a similar situation to reach out to hr[at]anthropic.com and legal[at]anthropic.com, though obviously can't guarantee that they'll release everyone. Feel free to DM or email for advice if you're in a similar situation.

I'll take advantage of my newfound freedoms to say that...

Idk, I don't really have anything too disparaging to say (though I dislike the use of concealed non-disparagements in general and am glad they say they're stopping!). I'm broadly a fan of Anthropic, think their heart is likely in the right place and they're trying to do what's best for the world (though could easily be making the wrong calls) and would seriously consider returning in the right circumstances. I've recommended that several friends of mine accept offers to do safety and interp work there, and feel good about this (though would feel much more hesitant about recommending someone joins a pure capabilities team there). My biggest critique is that I have concerns about their willingness to push the capabilities frontier and worsen race dynamics and, while I can imagine reasonable justifications, I think they're under valuing the importance of at least having clear public positions and rationales for this kind of thing and their clear shift in policies since Claude 1.0

EDIT: An additional detail that I genuinely appreciate is that Anthropic paid for me to have an independent lawyer to help explain the separation agreement and negotiate some changes on my behalf (I didn't push back on the concealed non-disparagement, but did alter some other parts). They recommended an independent lawyer, who I used, but were also happy to pay for a lawyer of my choice. As far as I'm aware, this was quite a non-standard thing for a company to do, and I appreciate it and think this was good and ethical in a way that wasn't obligatory.

EDIT 2: Someone asked that I share the terms of the agreement.

The non-disparagement clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff, which I don't think was disparaging or untrue, but to be safe], each party agrees that it will not make or publish or cause to be made or published any disparaging or untrue remark about the other party or, as the case may be, its directors, officers or employees. However, nothing in this clause or agreement will prevent any party to this agreement from (i) making a protected disclosure pursuant to Part IVA of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and/or (ii) reporting a criminal offence to any law enforcement agency and/or a regulatory breach to a regulatory authority and/or participating in any investigation or proceedings in either respect.

The non-disclosure clause:

Without prejudice to clause 6.3 [referring to my farewell letter to Anthropic staff] and 7 [about what kind of references Anthropic could provide for me], both Parties agree to keep the terms and existence of this agreement and the circumstances leading up to the termination of the Consultant's engagement and the completion of this agreement confidential save as [a bunch of legal boilerplate, and two bounded exceptions I asked for but would rather not publicly share. I don't think these change anything, but feel free to DM if you want to know]

EDIT: For ICLR reviews, this largely still applies. The main distinction is that there’s much more encouragement to do serious additional experiments and upload a revised manuscript. I’ve generally seen scores change a fair bit more with ICLR than with other conferences, but this is meaningfully more work. Note also that all ICLR papers and reviews are public forever and can appear in Google results, so even if your paper is doomed, there is still an incentive to at least explain why your reviewers are being unreasonable.

To anyone currently going through NeurIPS rebuttals fun for the first time, some advice:

Firstly, if you're feeling down about reviews, remember that peer review has been officially shown to be a ridiculous random number generator in an RCT - half of spotlight papers are rejected by another review committee! Don't tie your self-worth to whether the roulette wheel landed on black or red. If their critiques don't make sense, they often don't (and were plausibly written by an LLM). And if they do make sense (and remember to control for your defensiveness), then this is great - you have valuable feedback that can improve the paper!

1. Read this guide to get a sense of what rebuttals are about
   1. Generally, be nice and polite, even if your reviewers are really annoying
2. You have three goals here:
   1. Improving the paper! Often reviewers raise some good and useful points, and ultimately one of the key goals is doing good research and communicating it well to the world
   2. Convince reviewers to like you, so they increase their score
   3. For unreasonable reviewers who dislike you, your goal is to convince the area chair (and other reviewers) that this person is wrong and unreasonable. This means you still should write a careful and well-argued rebuttal, even to onbnoxious reviewers, but have a different target audience in mind.
      1. Meta: The way the process works is that the area chair makes the final decision, and has a lot of discretion to overrule reviewers, but by default if lazy will go by the average reviewer score. You want to either increase average reviewer score, or convince the area chair to ignore the bad ones. Convincing a reviewer is just a means to the end.
3. One of the key things to do in the rebuttal is to improve the paper. Realistically, you can't upload a new version, so your actual goal is to convince people that you have improved the paper. It is an adversarial setting and people will generally assume you are lying if you just give empty words, especially saying you will do X by the camera ready. So the key question to ask is how can you show proof of work? Running experiments and reporting the results is one good way (or even just saying that you've done them).
4. A common piece of feedback is "this is badly written".
   1. This common because it's often true! Writing papers is hard (some advice).
   2. If you receive this feedback, try to fix it (eg give an LLM the reviews and your paper, and maybe my post, and ask it to give concrete feedback on how to improve things, along with quotes). This will improve the paper even if you don't get in
   3. One difficulty is that even if you improve the writing a bunch, this is hard to convince anyone of in the rebuttal, since they're normally not willing to re-read in detail (and NeurIPS doesn't even let you re upload).
   4. My best strategy is to make a long changelog of what you improved, to signal high effort, and put it in a top-level comment
   5. If the reviewer complained about a specific paragraph or section, copy in the reworded version of that
   6. It often helps to add an appendix with a glossary for key terms, ideally both intuitive and technical definitions
5. I recommend the following process:
   1. Copy all reviews to a google doc.
   2. Go through and comment on each complaint in each review, sorting them into misunderstandings, disagreements with you, presentation issues, and technical issues - either do this while on a call, or async
   3. Brainstorm how to address each complaint - prioritise the important ones
   4. Write a bullet point outline, and try to get feedback
   5. Write it up nicely and send.
6. You typically want to have a comment per review, and a top level comment covering critiques from multiple reviewers. For some insane reason NeurIPS 2025 removed your ability to make a top level comment - copy and paste between reviewers I guess?
   1. Picture the area chair as your audience for the top level comment. You want to begin with a paragraph about the strengths of your paper, as noted by reviewers, supported by reviewer quotes - imagine you're writing something the area chair can copy and paste into a meta-review about accepting you. Reviewer quotes are key for any positive claims as no one will trust you to be honest.
   2. If one reviewer hates you, the top-level comment is a good opportunity to try to discredit them by emphasising how other reviewers disagree, as politely as possible. For example, we appreciated the constructive critique from bad reviewer that X, and have changed Y to fix it. But we are glad to see that good reviewers A and B thought Z followed by quotes supporting Z from the good reviewers, where Z contradicts X as much as possible.
7. Some technical complaints are best addressed by doing new experiments - you have 1-2 weeks to do this but should ask yourself how long it'll take and whether this is the best use of time. Time is constrained and you want to maximise returns per unit time, and new experiments often take much longer than writing or conceptual rebuttals - prioritise these carefully.

Cross posting one of my tweet threads that people here might enjoy

A recent dilemma of mine: how to eat less sweet food but still have it in moderation? I don't want to spend the willpower required to cut it out entirely, or to agonise every time about whether something is really worth it

My surprisingly elegant solution: Randomise! Have it with probability 2/3 (or probability of your choice) Abiding by the RNG is far easier than resisting temptation!

This is surprisingly general! Probabilistic dieting? Probabilistic vegetarianism? Half the moral benefits, far easier. Well, at least personally, I would find "toss a coin at each meal for whether to have meat" more than twice as easy as cutting it entirely.

I would also be very curious if this helps people cut back on drugs like alcohol/tobacco/etc.

You can also change the probability over time, eg if giving something up feels really hard, you can do it at 90% each day, and reduce that by 1% every day until it reaches 0 in 3 months.

Note: this doesn't work if you can re-roll immediately after so you need restrictions on when you can pick a new random number - for snacks I can have any time I do one random pick a day, one a meal is also fine

I also recommend carrying dice around in your pocket, or having a random number generator on your watch or phone - makes this way easier to do whenever. Bonus points if you use a quantum RNG.

This is also very useful for analysis paralysis, eg what to eat for dinner or wear

I'm considering writing a follow-up FAQ to my pragmatic interpretability post, with clarifications and responses to common objections. What would you like to see addressed?