Randan Marie Steinhauser

There might as well be a sign on the Senate floor that says “Property of Big Tech.” The Senate needs to put safety over profit and protect kids online

TWP reports that Anthropic gathered around 15 Christian leaders at its headquarters in late March - from Catholic and Protestant communities, as well as academia and business - to discuss the moral and spiritual development of Claude. The conversations went beyond abstract «AI ethics» and into very concrete questions: how Claude should respond to people in grief, how it should behave in situations involving risk of self-harm and whether AI can be considered something more than just a tool. At one point, the discussion even reached the question of whether Claude could be seen as a «child of God». This no longer looks like typical Silicon Valley safety talk. According to the article, there are people within Anthropic who are not willing to fully dismiss the idea that they might be creating an entity toward which they could one day have moral obligations. This is especially notable given that Dario Amodei has already entertained the possibility of some form of consciousness in Claude, and the company itself has long emphasized the need to shape not just behavior, but a kind of moral character in the model. Anthropic is already in conflict with the Pentagon and against this backdrop, the meeting with religious leaders doesn’t look like a strange eccentricity, but rather a sign that the company is searching for a moral framework beyond purely secular techno-thinking because the developers themselves seem to sense that traditional rationalist frameworks may not be sufficient for the kinds of questions AI is beginning to raise.

Is this an attempt to distract from the New Yorker piece?

OpenAI is spinning up an AI safety research fellowship program similar to MATS or Anthropic Fellows. People should apply!