Mrinank Sharma, Indian-ogirin AI safety researcher, resigned from Anthropic, arguing the world is in peril, not just from AI, but a “whole series of interconnected crises”His exit sets the stage for AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled to take place in New Delhi from February 16-20, where global leaders will confront issues like governance, safety and jobsxxxxGagandeep AroraTribune News ServiceChandigarh, February 10The resignation of Mrinank Sharma, an AI safety researcher at Anthropic, one of the largest AI companies in the world, has sparked a fresh debate within the global technology community, after Sharma warned that the “world is in peril” from the unchecked acceleration of artificial intelligence.An Indian-origin AI safety researcher with a PhD from Oxford, Sharma’s departure underscores growing tensions in AI ethics amid fierce competition. It comes in the run up to India hosting its flagship inaugural AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi from February 16-20, where IT titans like Sundar Pichai (Google), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and others, including Bill Gates and Yann LeCun, are expected to attend.With Anthropic CEO Amodei himself attending, the summit gains urgency post-Sharma’s exit, as discussions on AI governance, safety, job impacts and infrastructure will directly address his warnings of peril from rapid and unguided deployment.Earlier this month, new Anthropic launches hit Indian IT stocks like Infosys and TCS, which plunged on automation fears. Globally, Nasdaq tech fell 8 per cent on the day of the launches, with Oracle and Salesforce hit, as tools threaten consulting, outsourcing and white-collar roles. CEO Amodei has predicted major job shifts in the next five years.Sharma, who closed his resignation on LinkedIn with William Stafford’s poem, “The Way It Is,” symbolising an unyielding moral thread through chaos, argued humanity teetered near a threshold demanding wisdom to match tech power, beyond just AI to intertwined global threats. His final work examined AI’s erosion of human agency, amplifying calls for caution.He joined Anthropic two years ago to bolster safety measures but cited internal misalignments where stated values clashed with scaling pressures.The first few lines of Stafford’s poem, said to be on the list of “100 essential poems”, goes like this: “There’s a thread you follow/It goes among things that change/But it doesn’t change/People wonder about what you are pursuing/You have to explain about the thread.The AI Impact Summit, positioning India as an AI policy hub, amplifies this relevance, convening leaders to debate regulation, compute access, open versus closed models and workforce transformation at a pivotal moment.Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, released early this month, boosts coding, long-task sustainment and professional outputs like financial analysis. Claude Cowork, launched in January with plugins for legal, marketing and data tasks, automates high-volume work. These tools enable AI agents for complex projects, challenging SaaS firms.These are companies that provide Software as a Service (Saas), meaning they deliver software applications over the internet, usually on a subscription basis. Instead of installing programmes on individual computers, users access them via the cloud.