Anthropic’s Quest to Give A.I. Morals

This week, Max Read talks to the Times religion correspondent Elizabeth Dias, the tech reporter Erin Griffith and the opinion writer David Wallace-Wells about Anthropic’s private meetings with religious scholars on A.I. consciousness and how to make Claude “good,” its differences with the Vatican and the new belief systems taking shape in Silicon Valley.

Panelists

• Elizabeth Dias, national religion correspondent for The New York Times.

• Erin Griffith, a tech reporter for The New York Times.

• David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for The New York Times.

Additional Reading

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

• What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind.

• I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken

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Credits

This episode of “Hard Fork” was hosted by Max Read, produced by Whitney Jones and edited by Vjeran Pavic, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin and Brooke Minters. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Diane Wong and Chris Wood. Fact-checking by Will Peischel.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa, Pui-Wing Tam, Maddy Masiello and Dahlia Haddad.