Earlier this year, Anthropic flew a Hindu monk into its San Francisco office. Swami Sarvapriyananda, who leads the Vedanta Society of New York and belongs to the Ramakrishna Order, wasn't there for a courtesy visit. According to his own account of the trip, he was there to help the company think through how its chatbot Claude should tell right from wrong.
He says he wasn't alone in the room either. Theologians, counsellors and mental health professionals sat in on the same sessions, all under non disclosure agreements, all shown work Anthropic hadn't made public yet. Sarvapriyananda has said the meetings covered both how Claude gets trained and the wider questions around AI ethics, and that he personally spent, in his words, hours and hours talking with one of the company's founders. That detail comes from him, not from Anthropic, so take it as his account of what happened rather than a confirmed company statement.
