Anthropic seeks advice from Christian leaders on Claude's moral and spiritual behavior

Anthropic invited roughly 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and business to a two-day summit at the end of March. According to the Washington Post, the $380 billion startup was looking for guidance on how to handle the moral and spiritual behavior of its chatbot Claude. Topics ranged from how to respond to grieving or at-risk users to whether an AI could be considered a "child of God."

Participants like Silicon Valley-based Catholic priest Brendan McGuire and Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan said they were convinced the company's interest was genuine. "They’re growing something that they don’t fully know what it’s going to turn out as," said McGuire.

The summit is another sign that Anthropic tends to view an AI model as something beyond a piece of technology. The company isn't alone in this: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also leaned on spiritual metaphors in the past. He's said, for example, that OpenAI was trying to develop "magical intelligence in the sky" and that he felt "on the side of the angels."