The Verge – Spoiler: the nine-person team works for Anthropic – “…Nearly every major AI company has some kind of safety team that’s responsible for mitigating direct, obvious harms like AI systems being used for scams or bioweapons. The goal of the societal impacts team — which does not have a direct analog at OpenAI, Meta, or Anthropic’s other big competitors — is broader. Ganguli sees his job as finding “inconvenient truths” about AI that tech companies have incentives not to publicize, then sharing them with not only Anthropic leadership, but the rest of the world. “We are going to tell the truth,” Ganguli said. “Because, one, it’s important. It’s the right thing to do. Two, the stakes are high. These are people. The public deserves to know. And three, this is what builds us trust with the public, with policymakers. We’re not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. We’re just trying to say what we’re seeing in the data.” The team meets in the office five days a week, spending a good amount of time in Anthropic’s eighth-floor cafeteria, where Saffron Huang, one of the research scientists, usually grabs a flat white before a working breakfast with Ganguli and others…”