Matt Clifford resigned as chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Britain's high-risk research funder, on 7 September, five days after announcing that he was joining Anthropic as managing director for international affairs1. He had initially intended to keep the ARIA chair alongside the new role.
Dame Chi Onwurah, who chairs the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, wrote to government the following week flagging the conflict between chairing a public funder of frontier research and working for a company operating in the field it funds. Clifford stepped down on the day her committee published its comment. Onwurah says she expects a detailed response from government on how the conflict arose and what safeguards protect ARIA's governance.
Chemistry World reports that government asked Clifford to stay on in a transitional capacity until 6 November while a selection process runs2. ARIA opened the first funding call of its olfactory perception programme on 12 August, one of four programmes that UK Research and Innovation, Innovate UK and ARIA opened between them that month. The agency commits public money into work sitting one step from commercial exploitation, so the identity of the person signing off those commitments carries weight beyond the courtesy of a register entry.
The resolution arrived quickly and by the ordinary route: a select committee named the structural problem, and the appointee left the public post rather than the private one. No finding of wrongdoing attaches to Clifford. What remains open is the process question Onwurah has put to government, which is how a conflict of this shape reached the point of needing a resignation at all.
