Currying favor: Over the last several months, it appears that Anthropic higher-ups have been meeting with religious leaders from different faith traditions—Catholics and Ubuntu practitioners and Mormons and Jews (no, this isn't a setup for a joke)—to explore questions of how to do moral formation for Claude and whether Claude is conscious or capable of suffering. Or, looked at more cynically, they're not exploring the idea, but trying to convince.
One rabbi, per The New York Times' reporting on the meetings, believed that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah and his colleagues "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." This observation was echoed by others who met with Olah:
