philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.

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It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. ...

Quietly, Mr. Olah and his team at Anthropic have been on a frantic and high stakes quest to understand the A.I. models they have unleashed on the world and to convince the models to abide by a moral code that will protect humanity.

To do that, Mr. Olah began reaching out last fall to religious thinkers from different faiths. What followed was an extensive series of confidential meetings, calls and discussions — many of them revealed here for the first time — where many participants were required to sign N.D.A.s preventing them from revealing any of Anthropic’s unpublished research. ...

Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead. ...

I have spent my career exploring what people believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I listened, it became clear that Anthropic’s interest in the world of faith was about more than training its technology. Rather, the company was sharing a new kind of creation story — one that raises profound questions about the nature of the human spirit and the future of humanity. ...

The result, released in January, was a new “constitution” for Claude, an 84-page document written for Claude that the company said outlined “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be” and “the values we would like Claude to embody.” It operates as a foundational moral text to guide Claude’s behavior.

Instead of having the models follow a specific list of rules, the constitution focuses on developing the models’ overall character, informing the way they make decisions. ...

The constitution, Anthropic decided, was not enough to ensure Claude acted responsibly. Like humans, the models needed to learn to cultivate virtue.

Mr. Olah wanted to see what his team could learn from human morality that it could apply to the models — a process he calls “moral formation.”

“How do you help them be stable? How do you help them to mature? How do you help them be, you know, deeply moral?” Mr. Olah said. ...

For humans, morality has rarely depended on simply following rules. Communities also shape morality. Values are inherited and imparted over time, learned as we live together in our bodies in the physical world. But A.I. models have no bodies. And Anthropic was aiming to make them embrace morality in a matter of months, as fears intensified of their accelerating power and inability to be controlled. ...

He also said that regardless of whether Claude was an entity that deserved moral care, the way humans treated Claude could be important as it could affect how Claude behaved. ...

Mr. Olah and his team spent hours making the case for their A.I. models. They described Claude’s “feelings” and how they tracked what they called “emotional vectors” — what they described as artificial neurons that activate responses like love, anger, fear and sadness.

Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group. ...

A key part of the presentation, participants said, was what Anthropic called the model’s “persona selection,” about how to get Claude to see itself as a virtuous actor. The company argued that how people treated Claude could affect how Claude treated people. ...

After one discussion, Mr. Olah grew excited when a participant brought up the idea of having models confess, much like the Catholic sacrament of confession. Mr. Olah saw value not just in a model alerting when it had done something bad, but also in how the act of confession could shape the model’s sense of itself and thus its choices.

“The kind of character who confesses, that has an effect on character as well, right?” he told me. ...

“The whole convening should have happened at the design stage,” she said. “All the companies should have done that. We are now reverse engineering the ethics.” ...

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” Leo wrote. Calling for the “moralization of machines — the so-called ‘alignment’ of A.I. with human values” should require a shared understanding of the ethics involved.

“Otherwise, those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems,” Leo said. ...

When his turn on the pope’s stage came, Mr. Olah acknowledged that every frontier A.I. lab, including Anthropic, had business incentives that conflicted with moral behavior. He urged outside voices like the Vatican to hold them accountable and to speak out on A.I.’s impact on the poor and on human flourishing, two issues of widespread concern.

The world saw a shared stand for a human future. But Mr. Olah subtly made another case, too.

“I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.” ...

Anthropic held another convening this month that included religious thinkers, according to three participants. An Anthropic spokeswoman said that the meeting focused more broadly on human flourishingand that the company’s outreach has expanded beyond religious leaders to include others like psychologists and civil society leaders. ...

I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on A.I. Mr. Olah hesitated.

“Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training. ...

See the full story here; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html