Inside Anthropic's Quest to Instill Morality into Its A.I. Models

These models should be aligning themselves to the customer, not coming up with their own motivations.It's ironic that the alignment folks are actually training Claude to have it's own idea of good/bad and not even fully trust Anthropic.What ever happened to computers doing what they were told? reply: >What ever happened to computers doing what they were told?the mass psychosis and the endless culture war of the smartphone era.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral... reply: Asking people to create an account to read the article isn't cool dude. https://archive.is/y8FW0

> Anthropic treated a group of religious thinkers to dinner at a high-end tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco after a long day.Well funded company organizes PR event to shape the narrative that its product is more magical than it really is. News at 11. reply: Personally, I’d like to experience a low-end tasting menu restaurant.

It’s hard to take the article seriously when there’s no real discussion about how consciousness is defined and it takes Anthropic’s views of Claude and their software at face value. I wish there was more critique from journalists about how technocrats talk about their products. reply: The entire article is an exercise in "CEO said a thing!" journalism[0], it seems. No technical discussion is had; it jumps straight into relaying people's feelings when simply shown the output of an algorithm.The most poignant criticism of the use of the algorithm itself happens almost accidentally, at the end of the article, by the tech executive being interviewed.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.[0]: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/ceo-said-a-thing

Only humans can have morality. If you do not feel pain, you cannot empathize with pain if you cannot die, you cannot emphasize with the loss of life.Just stop this already.You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star. reply: .. Animals other than humans perhaps, as well?

It’s interesting that this went from “you’ll be accused of AI psychosis if you think your AI might be conscious” to “mainstream but somewhat niche opinion” in just 5 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910989(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool. reply: Reporting on an opinion of a $2T company doesn't really suggest that it's mainstream. Anything their leadership believes is newsworthy. If they say that reptilians rule the Earth, it's going to get NYT coverage too.I've not seen any surveys, but I'm betting it's a very niche belief outside of SFBA AI safety circles and a handful of allies on HN and X.