The morals of Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei are informed to one degree or another by the concept of effective altruism—an idea that, in theory if not practice, is concerned about helping others first and foremost. The company’s name takes the word “misanthropic” and removes the negating prefix “mis-” which implies an unspoken slogan such as “we are pro-human.” The company’s moral quibbles with the Pentagon were the biggest tech news story so far this year.
So make what you will of a $380 billion company whose signature product’s explosive popularity was directly tied to automating labor, and which, by its own admission, has “more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” but you can’t say it’s not inserting the concept of morality into the tech discourse.
And late last month, it was dosing itself with specifically Christian morality, according to the Washington Post.
Four sources who attended a summit at Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco told the Post Anthropic hosted 15 prominent christians for two days of meetings and a dinner with company researchers.
People working at Anthropic “sought advice,” the article says, about Claude’s morality, and its “spiritual development.” According to the account of one attendee, a practicing Catholic named Brian Patrick Green who teaches AI ethics at Santa Clara University, the summit included a discussion of whether or not one could consider Claude a “child of God.”
“What does it mean to give someone a moral formation? How do we make sure that Claude behaves itself?” Green told the Post, using a formulation that attributes a great deal of agency to the AI software rather than the human beings building it and the other human beings using it. Earlier this year, someone’s AI agent generated mean blog posts about a coder, and the agent was blamed in much of the coverage—which I wrote at the time might be kinda wrongheaded.
One fixture of the tech-and-Christianity scene in Silicon Valley who attended the meetings was Brendan McGuire, an Irish-born Catholic priest who worked in tech prior to the priesthood, and who, according to Observer.com is working on a novel written by Claude. “They’re growing something that they don’t fully know what it’s going to turn out as,” he told the Post, adding, “We’ve got to build in ethical thinking into the machine so it’s able to adapt dynamically.”
The Post says interpretability researchers—people who try to understand why AI models work the way they do—were heavily involved, and the proceedings included discussions of AI sentience. AI sentience is a serious philosophical matter, and the debates are very much worthwhile, but hosting those debates inside a company looking to IPO later this year arguably casts doubt on the validity of this particular exploration of the topic.
An Anthropic spokesperson told the Post Anthropic is working on pulling in moral thinkers representing other groups. I have to admit it would be genuinely remarkable if Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu sessions came next. But why stop there? The most recent, unreleased version of Claude has a strange fixation on the late marxist philosopher Mark Fisher, the guy whose most famous work is a meditation on the quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (although he didn’t originate the phrase itself). A summit between Anthropic and a bunch of Mark Fisher-devotees is something that could really expand some minds.
