Anthropic Reassigns Security Role to Product Team During Strike

Anthropic moved its security function under the product organization on Tuesday after the company's dedicated security staff began an unannounced work stoppage, according to internal communications reviewed by Nextish News. The restructuring, described in a memo sent to engineering leads as a temporary measure to maintain "operational resilience during this period of transition," was intended to run through the end of the month. By Wednesday afternoon, the company had made it permanent.

We realized the best way to ensure continuity was to distribute security across teams that were already making decisions.

"We realized the best way to ensure continuity was to distribute security across teams that were already making decisions," said Marcus Webb, Anthropic's vice president of organizational design, in a statement to staff. Webb had previously managed the company's rotating office snack budget and was chosen for the role because he had experience "thinking systemically about resource allocation," according to a hiring announcement from eighteen months prior. The security team had been housed in a separate reporting line since the company's founding.

No one reported a decrease in security practices or compliance velocity after the change. The product team, which had been shipping features according to a schedule set during the previous quarter, continued shipping features according to that same schedule. The only measurable difference was that decisions that had previously been reviewed by a security officer were now reviewed by the product manager who had proposed them, a step that took approximately seven minutes per decision instead of the previous forty-five.

At press time, the security staff had returned to the office and discovered their access badges no longer functioned. The company's facilities team, which now reports to marketing, said the situation was under review.