So make what you want of a $380 billion company whose signature product’s explosive popularity is directly tied to automating labor, and which, by its own admission, “has more in common with the War Department than we have differences,” but you can’t say it isn’t incorporating the concept of ethics into the tech discussion.
And at the end of last month, it was dosing itself specifically. Christian Ethics, according to the Washington Post.
Four sources who attended a summit at Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco told Post Anthropic that 15 prominent Christians were hosted for two days of meetings and dinners with company researchers.
People who worked at Anthropique “sought advice” about Claude’s morality and his “spiritual development,” the article says. According to a description by one attendee, a practicing Catholic named Brian Patrick Green who teaches AI ethics at Santa Clara University, the summit included a discussion on whether one could consider the cloud a “child of God.”
“What does it mean to give someone a moral formation? How do we make sure Claude behaves well?” Green described the Post as using a formulation that attributes a greater degree of agency to AI software rather than to the humans who create it and other humans who use it. Earlier this year, someone’s AI agent produced nasty blog posts about a coder, and most of the coverage blamed the agent – what I wrote at the time may have been slightly inaccurate.
One prominent figure in the tech-and-Christianity scene in Silicon Valley who attended the meetings was Brendan McGuire, an Irish-born Catholic priest who worked in tech before the priesthood, and who, according to Observer.com, is working on a novel written by Claude. “They are developing something that they have no idea what the consequences of it are going to be,” he told the Post. He added, “We have to build ethical thinking into the machine so that it is able to adapt dynamically.”
The post said that explanatory researchers – people who try to understand why AI models work the way they do – were heavily involved, and the proceedings included a discussion of AI sentience. AI sentience is a serious philosophical matter, and the debates are very worthwhile, but hosting those debates inside a company looking for an IPO later this year casts doubt on the validity of this particular exploration of the topic.
An Anthropic spokesperson said Post Anthropic is working to attract ethical thinkers representing other groups. I have to admit that it would be really remarkable if there were Jewish, Muslim and Hindu sessions next. But why stop there? The most recent, unpublished edition of Cloud features an odd fix on the late Marxist philosopher Mark Fisher, the man whose best-known work focuses on the quote “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (though he did not originate the phrase). A summit between Anthropic and a group of Mark Fisher-devotees is something that could really expand some minds.
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