Silicon Valley gets religion

Chatbot makers, theologians, and faith-tech entrepreneurs are trying to align artificial intelligence with moral and religious traditions

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Over a formal lunch in Washington last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat down with two dozen conservative thought leaders to pitch Claude, his company's chatbot, as the most ethical option on the market. 

The pitch went sideways almost immediately. When attendees asked which ethical code Claude actually followed, whether Christian, Aristotelian, or Nietzschean, Amodei said he wasn't sure.

The anecdote has been making the rounds in recent weeks, and it captures a question now bedeviling the AI industry. As chatbots move deeper into education, health care, customer service, and even pastoral care, the companies building them are being forced to answer something philosophers have argued about for millennia. What does good actually mean, and whose version gets coded into the model?

Anthropic goes looking for a soul

Anthropic has taken the question more publicly than most of its competitors. The company's constitution says its central aim is to make Claude a "genuinely good, wise, and........

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