Silicon Valley insiders are warning against Anthropic’s cult-like employees, culture, and devotion to its Artificial intelligence model.
Anthropic’s workforce have a quasi-religious relationship to its chatbot, Claude, with members of staff attending a “funeral” for one version, Claude 3 Sonnet, in San Francisco and allowing another model, Opus 3, to continue publishing essays after being “retired.”
Other whispers in the valley are that Anthropic employees have started worshipping Claude like an actual god.
“These people are treating AI as if it’s a human in disguise, with human motives, with human emotions, with some degree of consciousness, with intentions,” Pedro Domingos, a University of Washington professor who has known Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and its top engineers for years, warned The Post.
“The only intelligence that we know is human and animal intelligence. So naturally, when you see a computer behave intelligently, you immediately project onto it all of these things it doesn’t have.
“Why on earth would AI want to kill us all? AIs don’t want things. AIs are algorithms.”
Anthropic — valued at $965 billion — keeps 80% of its engineers for at least two years, the best rate of any frontier lab, according to venture firm SignalFire.
“When Anthropic hires people, same with [rivals] OpenAI, they really filter for like-minded people,” Domingos said. “It’s like a cult, right? They recruit the people who are most prone to the cult. It gives them very low turnover.”
During the job interview process, prospective employees at the 2,500-person company are asked to pledge their allegiance to public safety above profit, and even psychologically profiled to see if they will uphold that, according to The Information. Still, like many tech companies, engineers are expected to work up to 90 hours a week to fulfil their roles, according to the BBC.
Amodei gives biweekly sermons, called “Vision Quests” which have been likened to sermons, and the company once hosted 15 Christian leaders of various denominations to help inform Claude’s morality.
As The Post has previously reported, many of those working at Anthropic are also proponents of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, a philosophy which effectively boils down to its self-appointed leaders, and their billionaire backers, knowing better than anyone else.
“Their idea [of EA] is that history follows certain patterns, and only a small group of people can see those patterns, while everyone else is ignorant. Those people are then supposed to lead society, entire nations and the rest of humanity toward progress.
“But what qualifies you to lead? Who gave you that privilege?” asked Richard Tang, an AI engineer and scientist at a Silicon Valley tech company who asked his employer not be identified.
Effective Altruism’s origins are usually credited to the work of philosophers William MacAskill and Peter singer, drawing from the aims of many nonprofit groups. The premise, first coined in 2011, is for people to use reasoning, evidence and rationality to act in a way which provides the most good for others.
Its most famous adherent is former cryptocurrency poster boy Sam Bankman Fried. He stated his aim in business was to make as much money as possible, then use it to benefit humanity. In reality, he defrauded investors in his FTX crypto exchange of over $3 billion and is now serving 25 years in prison.
As part of spreading its altruistic AI gospel, Anthropic announced a program in June to recruit an army of 1,000 young people, train them to use its Claude chatbot then embed them in nonprofit organizations.
The operation, called “Claude Corps,” got a $150 million investment from Anthropic, placing workers at Goodwill Industries, YMCA of Charlotte, NC, and 400 other groups.
Posts offer a “full-time salary of $85,000” as well as support from Anthropic’s head office and coding mentors, with placements lasting a year.
The company also pays $3,600 to students who take part in its Claude Campus Ambassador Program, promoting its AI at colleges.
Meanwhile, Anthropic-linked billionaires pay the salaries of over 80 journalists working in mainstream newsrooms through the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Such journalists are paid to report on the AI industry yet rarely investigate or criticize their backers, which include Anthropic, in any meaningful way, The Post has found.
The company also invests in METR, an AI safety company, which counts a number of Effective Altruism disciples and radical leftists among its scientists and technicians, who evaluate if AI poses a catastrophic risk to the public.
The result is that on one hand, Anthropic is developing AI, funding its adoption in the workplace and promoting it, but on the other Amodei and his employees are warning the AI they have created is so powerful it could break loose and kill us all.
“Anthropic started out saying you need to slow down more, yet they’re in a race with OpenAI running faster than anybody else. It’s like something out of a comedy,” Domingos, author of “The Master Algorithm,” said.
Calls for regulation and a bid for antitrust agreements from Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which are preparing to launch on the stock market, have been met with skepticism — by the president, government and industry.
Xiaoyin Qu, an entrepreneur and founder of agentsky.dev, sees business calculations behind the warnings.
“I think the timing of those warnings is connected to external events and to their desire for more government oversight,” Qu told the Post. “In many cases, it is a business decision framed in ideological terms.”
“The difficulty is defining safety,” she added. “There isn’t a very clear definition of what counts as safe and what counts as unsafe.”
Domingos agrees there is a level of self-interest, but also thinks the paranoia is real.
“The people in Anthropic were not selected at random. It was started by these people who were on the loony fringe of OpenAI, which was already on the loony fringe of AI.
“The cult, including Dario himself, are people who genuinely believe that there’s a chance that AI will decide to exterminate us. And honestly, that sincere belief is more dangerous than cynical beliefs.
“They just have this ingrained belief that they are the only ones who can actually steer this rapture towards heaven as opposed to hell.
Some employees are, he added, “sincerely worried about the AI Satan coming for us.”
Anthropic did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Although the latest alarm was raised by a whistleblower who quit Anthropic last week, Amodei’s calls for regulation were seconded by other AI bigwigs — Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, who owns Grok — both of whom are likely to benefit from greater AI regulation, which would mostly put the squeeze on smaller companies and open source models.
Domingos claimed in contrast to Amodei, OpenAI’s Altman is “an opportunist, a hustler, an operator” who “plays the alarmist more than he really feels alarmist” to keep his engineers loyal.
He also points out that while some AI engineers are ringing the alarm, others are just happy to take fat paychecks and be at the forefront of their industry.
“There’s a large number of people at Anthropic now, who really don’t buy any of this crap,” he said. “They’re just there because it’s the most exciting place to be doing AI and they’re going to do very well monetarily.”
