Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei’s ethos is informed to one degree or another. with the concept of effective altruism– an idea that in theory if not in practiceprimarily concerned with helping others. The company’s name takes the word “misanthropic” and removes the negative prefix “mis-“, implying an unspoken slogan like “we’re pro-human.” The company’s moral spat with the Pentagon was the biggest tech news of the year..
So do what you will A $380 billion company whose signature product was explosive popularity directly related to labor automationand which by his own admission“We have more in common with the War Department than we have differences,” but you can’t say that it doesn’t introduce the concept of morality into technological discourse.
Late last month, he was custom-dosing himself Christian morality, According to the Washington Post.
Four sources who attended the summit at Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco told the Post Anthropic hosted 15 prominent Christians for two days of meetings and dinners with company researchers.
People working at Anthropic were “seeking advice” about Claude’s morality and his “spiritual development,” the article said. The summit debated whether to consider Claude a “child of God,” according to one attendee, Brian Patrick Green, a practicing Catholic who teaches AI ethics at Santa Clara University.
“What does it mean to give someone spiritual formation? How can we make sure Claude behaves?” Green told the Post, using a formula that attributes a large agency to the AI software, not the people who built it and other people who use it. Earlier this year, someone’s AI agent generated average blog posts about the coder, and the agent was blamed for much of the coverage—What I wrote at that time may be a bit of a misconception.
Participating in the sessions was Brendan McGuire, an Irish Catholic priest who worked in technology before becoming a priest, a fixture of Silicon Valley’s tech and Christian scene. According to Observer.com He is working on a novel written by Claude. “They’re breeding something that they don’t quite know what’s going to happen,” he told Posta, adding, “We need to build the ethical thinking into the machine so that it can dynamically adapt.”
The Post says interpretive researchers — people trying to understand why AI models work — were heavily involved, and the proceedings included discussions about artificial intelligence. AI sensitivity a is a serious philosophical issueand debates are very valuable, but to have these discussions within the company It expects an IPO later this year doubts the accuracy of this particular study of the subject.
An Anthropic spokesperson told the Post that Anthropic is working to engage moral thinkers representing other groups. I have to admit that it would be really remarkable if the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu sessions followed. So why stop there? The Claude’s latest, as-yet-unreleased version contains an odd allusion to the late Marxist philosopher Mark Fischer.the guy whose most famous work he pondered on the quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (although he didn’t coin the phrase himself). A summit between Anthropic and a bunch of Mark Fisher devotees is something that could really expand some thinking.
