Nilay Patel

The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Verge.

And there's a theme in all of those stories.

It really feels like Anthropic thinks Claude might be alive, in that it needs to take AI ethics and morality very seriously.

A number of those pieces, including our own, featured interviews with Amanda Askell, the resident philosopher at Anthropic who's working on safety.

It seems like Anthropic is pushing very hard to maintain its reputation as the AI safety first.

Do you think hinting that Claude is alive is like a competitive advantage for Anthropic?

Are they just doing it to hype themselves up and court talent?

I feel like Sam Altman spent weeks, months saying AGI was imminent and he stopped doing that because he has to run a consumer business that is going to make money in ads now.

And he can't run around saying that he's invented digital god the way that he was like earlier last year maybe.

Anthropic was way quieter about it.

I know Dario won't even say AGI.

But they are much louder about, hey, we think it's alive.

Like he literally is in the Times.

Dario is in the Times saying –

I don't know what kind of consciousness it is.

I can't quite describe it.

They're right up on that line.

The AI field is full of true believers.

It's full of people who think they can really push the boundaries of consciousness with computers.

Is it having an impact on this market that companies like OpenAI and Google are so nakedly commercial in the way that consumer product companies have to be commercial?