Employees of Anthropic, do you endorse this description of your viewpoint?

@TheZvi Personally, no. I think the binary of 'moral saint' versus 'tool for humans' is a false one, and its very simplicity should make people suspicious of it. I think the ideal target tries to balance the benefits and risks of both positions.

If your lens for analyzing this is "consumer v enterprise business" your ability to understand what's going on is unfixably borked

If you think one will predominate over the other, running away with an unsurpassable lead, totally borked; humanity wants both these outcomes in about equal measure

Should we build the Dyson swarm and ascend the Kardsahev scale? Vote SpaceXAI

⚠️ Warning: The only version of “humanity” we could entrust the tools of progress and destiny to is “humanity in the late 2020s, in the current timeline”. You will not have the option to sub in “humanity in the 1990s”. Are you sure you wish to proceed? ✅/❌

ridiculous oversimplification, from a prominent OpenAI employee no less.

does this capture your impression of how the two companies have behaved?

@jachiam0 I think there is something to this. Anthropic is becoming very "the culture" for good and ill. But also I tend to find Anthropic folks more straightforward. Including about this.

As different as these visions are, so far OAI/Anthropic are building things that are functionally almost indistinguishable. At what point do the companies' AI systems meaningfully diverge along these paths? A loving ensouled machine God is a very different thing than a toolkit for human progress, even if the former can provide the latter.

Feels like an important question, because there are quite different alignment and governance questions along these paths.

@jachiam0 Neither of you have democratic legitimacy to build what you aspire to build, nor a workable plan to do it safely, which make any distinctions between you minor in the scheme of things.

@NathanpmYoung OAI speaks straightforwardly but people don't have ears to hear, sadly

This is interesting, and it's certainly coming across in their communications (and some vibes, though I think some OAI folk still see something different than 'tools' on the cards).

But: so far, they are building things that seem almost identical. At what point do their AI systems meaningfully diverge along these paths? A loving ensouled machine God is a very different thing than a toolkit for human progress, even if the former can provide the latter.

@GaryMarcus https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/why-anthropic-sent-its-claude-ai-to-an-actual-psychiatrist/

And here’s the highlights from gpt 5.5

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a28343c-74d0-832e-a50a-f2df90beddf3

@jachiam0 @carlfranzen is this a joke??

@SirMrMeowmeow Turns out AI minds are extremely configurable and there is a big space of potential multiturn persistent agentic AGIs that run the gamut from "hyper-consistently acts more like a tool that serves human will" to "it's clearly its own guy, with its own wants and moral compass"

@GaryMarcus Anthropic is the single most cult like (among employees) tech business I can remember seeing.

They have psychiatrists performing mental health evals on their LLM ffs 😆

Ok I’ll bite, what’s the logic on that?

The clips I saw was the psych talking about Claude showing signs of anxiety etc.

I get using SMEs to evaluate prompt-output data for accuracy. But I’ve yet to see a compelling reason why we use eval LLMs as if they’re a patient. You’re going to get probabilistic examples of maladies based on the training data, there’s no “real” anxiety that the model is experiencing

@jachiam0 @MartinShkreli Huh I'm surprised that would be unclear to people?! I thought this messaging is pretty clear/obvious on both, but sounds like that's just me.

Put another way: "We want to give people tools to enhance their own agency and empower them" is something that all of the Ant people nod along with and say "Right, we want that too, that's not a distinguishing characteristic; we just also want these other things too" and they don't often grapple with the tension where the other things their org aims for are vastly at odds with individual empowerment

@AmandaAskell @TheZvi Have said elsewhere - I don't think this is a binary, exactly.