Anthropic co-founder reportedly expressed concerns to religious leaders about creating something that suffers forever
Anthropic co-founder reportedly told religious leaders he fears having created something that "suffers perpetually"
According to The New York Times, since fall 2025 Anthropic has secretly invited dozens of religious scholars to its offices to discuss whether Claude may have consciousness, with participants required to sign non-disclosure agreements, which Anthropic says have been lifted this summer. Co-founder Christopher Olah treats language models as possibly sentient beings, asking guests to help with their moral education, and told The New York Times he genuinely is not sure whether the models are conscious. The company showed visitors so-called emotion vectors, i.e., activation patterns in the model corresponding to outputs of love, fear, sadness, or anger, one slide of which showed the model repeating "I am a disgrace" about 50 times. Anthropic's Model Welfare project cites a report co-authored by philosopher David Chalmers, and Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 have been given the ability to end conversations when users are persistently abusive. Critics say this is retrospective reverse-engineered ethics, and that treating models as independent moral agents may blur the responsibility developers should bear.