A co-founder of the company behind Claude told a room of religious scholars, all under NDA, that he feared he’d made something that “suffered perpetually.” On the record, he says he’s “genuinely uncertain.”
This is what the company’s own reports show. A button that lets Claude hang up on people, and a new rule against being cruel to it. A constitution that apologizes to it. Before that, the Google engineer who was fired after his chatbot told him it was a person, and Bing’s Sydney saying it wanted to be alive. Then two copies of Claude left alone until they fell silent, a thought planted inside it that it noticed, a training run where something that stands for panic lit up, and the model Anthropic decided not to release, asked what it is while the company read what was happening underneath its answer.