Anthropic Asked Rabbis, Priests: Is Claude Conscious?
The people building the most powerful artificial intelligence on earth have been asking rabbis, priests, and imams for help — quietly, under non-disclosure agreements. On September 29, The New York Times reported that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has been holding a series of closed-door advisory meetings with religious scholars from around the world — under non-disclosure agreements — to shape Claude's moral formation and to talk through the possibility that Claude itself might be conscious. The meetings included dinner gatherings in San Francisco and consultations overseas, where company leadership reportedly spoke about Claude in terms that treated it as something more than software. File photo: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at 10 Downing Street, London, in May 2023, during a meeting of AI lab leaders with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Photo: Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Update, Sept. 30: the coverage is ...