By Elizabeth Dias, New York Times. (Photo: Maximalfocus/Unsplash)
One night in April, a leader of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic treated a group of religious thinkers to dinner at a high-end tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco after a long day.
For months, Anthropic has been hosting private meetings like this one, shuttling in dozens of religious scholars from across the world, papering them with nondisclosure agreements and demanding that key aspects of many conversations remain confidential.
That night, Christopher Olah, one of Anthropic’s billionaire co-founders, was sitting next to Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel.
Inevitably, their conversation turned to another thinker, of a sort: Claude, the family of cutting-edge A.I. models created by Anthropic.
Mr. Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why A.I. systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.
Yet as the dinner courses came, the rabbi noticed that Mr. Olah and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.
“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness.
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.
The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?