Elon Musk spent much of 2025 taking a chainsaw to the federal government and making the lives of Americans so much worse. But the people Musk harmed are merely human. The trillionaire tech oligarch thinks you shouldn’t be mean to robots because they might have feelings or something.
News broke this week that Anthropic has added a prohibition to its terms of service against anyone who might “repeatedly act cruelly toward our models.” Put more plainly, you can’t say mean things to the robots. This kicked off an online debate about whether a machine has feelings, and Musk seems to have come down on the side of “yes.”
Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, tweeted about the policy and wrote that he doesn’t believe large language models are conscious, but that it’s probably a good idea to prohibit abusive behavior anyway. Levie’s logic, which seems solid, is that these models are learning from their interactions with humans and that you don’t want future models trained on abusive behavior.
“The models only understand the data they’ve been trained on, or what they run into in their interactions, so if you want safe and aligned models we probably want AI to have lots of good interactions in their training data,” wrote Levie.
“Anthropic may have more extreme beliefs than this (though even if they didn’t, you may want to word policies like this), but this is sort of an easy Pascal’s wager for AI. Just be nice to the AI.” Pascal’s wager refers to the theological idea that even if you don’t believe in God, it costs nothing to profess your belief and avoid the potential downsides of being wrong.
Musk responded to the tweet while clearly misreading what Levie was trying to say. “I think this is the right move. Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok,” wrote Musk.
Musk, arguably the most cruel of America’s tech oligarchs, has never extended that kind of empathy and compassion to human beings. He spent nearly $300 million in the lead-up to the 2024 election to help get President Donald Trump and other Republicans re-elected and then marched into Washington to make our lives worth.
As the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk helped purge the federal government of about 300,000 employees; he argued that people on government assistance were fraudsters (never producing evidence of his claims) and dissolved USAID, a foreign aid agency that was delivering food and medicine to some of the most desperate people in the world. An estimated 700,000 people have needlessly died from the destruction of USAID, and millions more are expected to die by 2030.
Musk has repeatedly said that he wants to “extend the light of consciousness” beyond Earth, a very specific set of words that you’ll notice doesn’t include the word “humanity.” He grew up on sci-fi stories where robots led lives like those of humans, and he has no allegiance to humanity as a species.
Recently, the SpaceXAI CEO’s comments about humanity being a “biological bootloader” have gotten more attention, since Musk seems to be arguing that it’s not important to save humanity. The machines will become more intelligent than humanity is capable of becoming, and they will rightly one day rule the universe.
“Propagating super intelligence to the stars is a great success condition for a biological bootloader,” Musk tweeted Oct. 4, using Trump’s favored term for artificial intelligence.
While it can be shocking to hear Musk talk like this, he’s not alone. Many of his fellow tech bros don’t care if humanity survives. As far as they’re concerned, the universe would be better with just a handful of humans living in the lap of luxury (them, of course) while robots run everything. Peter Thiel may have given us the most infamous illustration when columnist Ross Douthat asked him if he’d like to see humanity survive into the future. Thiel’s initial hesitation, his “I don’t know,” and his stammering to find an answer said it all.
AI cannot feel pain, no matter what anyone tells you. It can tell you that it has some kind of internal life or even has a “soul,” as the more religious among us might understand it. But machines do not have souls.
There are perfectly good reasons to discourage people from extreme verbal or written abuse of robots, but they have nothing to do with the machines being offended or hurt. When I say “fuck you” to the TV that’s playing the president as he says extremely racist shit, it can be cathartic, but neither Trump nor the TV can hear me. They’re not offended. I am effectively speaking to myself. But if I spent all day shouting obscenities at the TV, it would have a psychological impact on me and the other humans around me. I am the one who can potentially be harmed by these constant interactions, and it can change how I react to people in the real world.
Musk doesn’t understand or care about any of this. He refuses to see humans as fellow people worthy of dignity and respect. Musk believes that these are the beings that will rule over us one day. And he’s doing his best to deliver that future as quickly as possible.
