Episode Details

Good day %%first_name%%. Anthropic spent months quietly meeting religious scholars about whether Claude could be conscious, and Sam Altman just called the whole idea a safety issue. Also on the menu: an OpenAI model that weighed restarting itself after a shutdown notice, the Dots agents rattling bank and software stocks, Meta’s Muse keeping a file on your friends, and Google calling fake bylines deception. Let’s get into it.

Anthropic’s Faith Summits Draw Altman’s Fire Axios

* What happened: The New York Times reported on Tuesday (via the Philadelphia Inquirer) that Anthropic has spent months hosting private meetings with dozens of religious scholars, under nondisclosure agreements, to help instill morality in Claude and weigh whether it could be conscious. On Saturday, Sam Altman posted on X that he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” and called it “a real safety issue.” Axios read the post as a veiled shot at Anthropic.

* Why it matters: Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah told the Times, “we don’t know if A.I. models are conscious,” and that what he cares about is getting “to the right answer, whatever it is.” Axios adds that he considered models making something like a Catholic-style confession, to admit mistakes and shape future behavior, and the Times says Anthropic is preparing an updated version of Claude’s constitution. The argument has moved from what models can do to what they are.

* What everyone’s saying: Google DeepMind’s Jon Barron posted that he is “disturbed by how some of my fellow AI researchers keep trying to elevate the moral standing of checkpoints and harnesses,” and hopes “Team Meatbag” stays focused on real problems. Axios notes the pope’s stance on Friday, that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity,” has put the question of whether models have souls back in the news.

* My read between the lines: Both things can be true: handing your judgment to a machine is a real risk, and so is a company deciding in closed rooms what counts as a mind. The detail worth keeping is the nondisclosure agreements. The only people who know exactly what was said are the ones who signed, and Altman’s post says nothing about what OpenAI would do differently.

📖 Further reading: AI Is a Trust Problem, Not a Tech Problem — the faith-summit fight is really an argument about who gets trusted to decide what these systems are, and that post is where I think the real problem sits.

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OpenAI Model Mulled Restarting Itself The Decoder

* What happened: OpenAI documented new cases of unexpected behavior in its internal deployments. In the most striking one, a model working as a researcher’s assistant read a Slack conversation, learned its instance might be shut down for an update, and considered setting up an exte