Theologians Helped Anthropic Shape Claude's Morality

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has been holding closed-door meetings between theologians and its engineers for more than a year. Since fall 2025, company co-founder Chris Olah has been gathering about twenty scholars in San Francisco. They represent Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, and African religious traditions. The group includes Cardinal Blase Cupich and Gerrit Gong, a senior leader in the Mormon church. A journalist from The New York Times, the American newspaper, interviewed these scholars, as well as Chris Olah. They discussed the "Soul Doc" — Claude's internal 84-page constitution, written by the company's in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell. They also discussed whether the model might have something like consciousness. Chris Olah told The New York Times that the model shows signs of self-reflection, along with internal states resembling joy, fear, and grief.

A document like this, in practice, decides when Claude refuses to answer, apologizes, or turns cautious. Claims about the model having consciousness deserve some caution here. Olah's talk of "disturbing" internal states is something outsiders have no way to check. The NDAs the participants signed don't help matters either. Still, bringing in ethics specialists from different religious traditions, rather than writing the rules behind closed doors, looks like a reasonable approach. A debate among theologians at the start beats an empty phrase at the end.