Anthropic is a cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its god — they treat AI like it’s human: source | Latest Tech News
Silicon Valley insiders are warning against Anthropic’s cult-like staff, tradition, and devotion to its Artificial intelligence model.
Anthropic’s workforce have a quasi-religious relationship to its chatbot, Claude, with members of employees attending a “funeral” for one model, Claude 3 Sonnet, in San Francisco and permitting another model, Opus 3, to continue publishing essays after being “retired.”
Other whispers in the valley are that Anthropic staff have began worshipping Claude like an precise god.
An AI illustration imagining the “cult of Claude.”
“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 recognized Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and its top engineers for years, warned The Post.
“The only intelligence that we all know is human and animal intelligence. So naturally, when you see a pc behave intelligently, you immediately project onto it all of these issues 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 — retains 80% of its engineers for at least two years, the best fee of any frontier lab, according to enterprise firm SignalFire.
A model holding tons of of pages of Claude 3 Sonnet outputs, at the “funeral” held for the model of the chatbot. @repligate/X
Artist Aimee Pepper in her funeral robe posing forward of attending the “funeral” for Claude 3 Sonnet. @artbypep/X
“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 course of, potential staff at the two,500-person company are requested to pledge their allegiance to public security above revenue, and even psychologically profiled to see if they will uphold that, according to The Information. Still, like many tech firms, engineers are anticipated to work up to 90 hours a week to fulfil their roles, according to the BBC.
Amodei offers biweekly sermons, called “Vision Quests” which have been likened to sermons, and the company once hosted 15 Christian leaders of varied denominations to help inform Claude’s morality.
As The Post has beforehand reported, many of those working at Anthropic are also proponents of the Effective Altruism (EA) motion, a philosophy which successfully boils down to its self-appointed leaders, and their billionaire backers, understanding better than anybody else.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei delivers a speech during the AI Impact Summit on Thursday, February 19, 2026, in New Delhi. AFP via Getty Images
“Their concept [of EA] is that historical past follows sure patterns, and only a small group of people can see those patterns, while everybody else is ignorant. Those people are then supposed to lead society, whole nations and the remaining of humanity toward progress.
“But what qualifies you to lead? Who gave you that privilege?” requested Richard Tang, an AI engineer and scientist at a Silicon Valley tech company who requested his employer not be recognized.
Effective Altruism’s origins are normally credited to the work of philosophers William MacAskill and Peter singer, drawing from the goals of many nonprofit teams. The premise, first coined in 2011, is for people to use reasoning, evidence and rationality to act in a manner which supplies the most good for others.
Its most well-known adherent is former cryptocurrency poster boy Sam Bankman Fried. He said his purpose in business was to make as a lot money as potential, then use it to benefit humanity. In actuality, he defrauded traders in his FTX crypto exchange of over $3 billion and is now serving 25 years in prison.
Courtesy of Pedro Domingos”
As half of spreading its altruistic AI gospel, Anthropic announced a program in June to recruit an military of 1,000 younger people, prepare them to use its Claude chatbot then embed them in nonprofit organizations.
The operation, called “Claude Corps,” obtained a $150 million investment from Anthropic, inserting employees at Goodwill Industries, YMCA of Charlotte, NC, and 400 other teams.
Posts offer a “full-time salary of $85,000” as nicely as help from Anthropic’s head workplace and coding mentors, with placements lasting a 12 months.
The company also pays $3,600 to college students who participate in its Claude Campus Ambassador Program, selling its AI at faculties.
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 not often examine or criticize their backers, which embody Anthropic, in any significant manner, The Post has discovered.
A diver in a long-sleeve white REEF shirt adjusts scuba gear against a vibrant blue, cloud-streaked sky on June 11, 2026. Anthropic is launching Claude Corps, a national fellowship program to help nonprofits across America advance their missions utilizing AI. Anthropic
The company also invests in METR, an AI security company, which counts a quantity of Effective Altruism disciples and radical leftists among its scientists and technicians, who consider if AI poses a catastrophic risk to the public.
The consequence is that on one hand, Anthropic is developing AI, funding its adoption in the office and selling it, but on the other Amodei and his staff are warning the AI they have created is so highly effective it may break free 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, creator of “The Master Algorithm,” said.
Xiaoyin Qu of AgentSky.dev is an investor who is suspicious of the motives behind Anthropic’s calls for authorities regulation on AI. Xiaoyin Qu / X
Calls for regulation and a bid for antitrust agreements from Anthropic and OpenAI, both of that are making ready to launch on the stock market, have been met with skepticism — by the president, authorities 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.”
OpenAI founder Sam Altman talking during the G20 Innovation Ministerial on September 2 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Tech leaders from around the world gathered to converse forward of the G20 Summit. Getty Images
Domingos agrees there is a degree of self-interest, but also thinks the paranoia is real.
“The people in Anthropic weren’t chosen at random. It was began by these people who have been on the loony fringe of OpenAI, which was already on the loony fringe of AI.
“The cult, including Dario himself, are people who genuinely consider that there’s a likelihood that AI will resolve to exterminate us. And actually, that honest perception is more harmful than cynical beliefs.
“They just have this ingrained perception that they are the only ones who can really steer this rapture in the direction of heaven as opposed to hell.
An AI generated illustration created by a Large Laguage Model imagining Anthropic’s funeral for Claude 3 Sonnet. AI Illustration by Jesaca Lin/NY Post
Some staff are, he added, “sincerely worried about the AI Satan coming for us.”
Anthropic didn’t reply to The Post’s request for remark.
Although the latest alarm was raised by a whistleblower who give up Anthropic last week, Amodei’s calls for regulation have been seconded by other AI bigwigs — Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, who owns Grok — both of whom are seemingly to benefit from better AI regulation, which might principally put the squeeze on smaller firms and open source fashions.
Domingos claimed in distinction 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 factors out that while some AI engineers are ringing the alarm, others are just blissful to take fats 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.”
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