Is Claude Conscious? Silicon Valley Is Now Trying to Give AI a Soul
I thought we were building better software. Apparently, somewhere between autocomplete and artificial general intelligence, Silicon Valley decided it needed to reinvent theology. That is roughly where I found myself after reading the recent reporting about Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and its effort to wrestle with one of the strangest questions of the artificial-intelligence era: What if Claude is conscious? Not “smart.” Not “useful.” Not “capable of writing a decent resignation email without sounding like a hostage negotiator.” Conscious. As in possessing some form of internal experience that might deserve moral consideration. Anthropic has reportedly been gathering religious scholars, philosophers and other thinkers to discuss morality, consciousness and the ethical formation of its AI systems. Some participants signed nondisclosure agreements. They discussed concepts normally associated with human beings: virtue, character, suffering, emotional states, moral responsibility...
