The specter of an omnipotent large language model that rules over its AI engineers continues to loom large.
The industry already has had its fair share of brushes with ominously cult-like behavior, from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever commissioning wooden effigies to represent “unaligned” AIs to a murder sect that wanted to save the world from killer AI.
As it turns out, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is apparently no different. Just getting hired there requires prospective employees to pledge allegiance to AI safety and undergo a psychological profiling test, per The Information.
And according to a rumor that, per The Spectator‘s Sean Thomas, is running rampant in Silicon Valley these days, some Anthropic engineers are going as far as to “worship” the company’s AI model Claude.
“If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature,” Thomas wrote. “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it.”
For years now, tech leaders have claimed in thinly-veiled terms that they are working to build a God-like entity — a “magic intelligence in the sky,” as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it back in 2023.
Some startups have interpreted this in a very literal way, creating AI chatbots that claim to be channeling God himself, like a “prayer app” called Bible Chat, which touts itself as the “number one faith app in the world” with “over 40 million” Christian users.
Over the years, the conversation has shifted somewhat, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company’s rivals of making such claims without merit.
“It’s almost as if they kind of think they’re creating God or something and… it’s just — that’s not what we’re doing,” he told YouTuber Kane Sutter during a conversation in 2024.
But for those inclined to see a ghost in the machine, the consequences of thinking they’re talking to a god can be devastating, spiraling delusions in the form of AI psychosis that can lead them to believe that they themselves are prophets or even a divine figure like Jesus himself.
For many employed by a frontier AI lab, it could be a form of survival instinct. As the BBC reported last month, some employees as working up to 90 hours a week, a “grueling work culture” marked by “cut-throat” performance reviews and frequent layoffs.
It’s a belief that has some arguing AI could eventually turn from a benevolent deity to a harbinger of death, with rogue agents triggering the downfall of humanity. In many ways, that’s the natural conclusion of an existential fear driven by their faith in an all-powerful emerging entity.
Yet their attempts to strike the fear of God into our souls should have anybody skeptical of obsessive tech leaders’ claims, especially given the enormous financial incentives behind the scenes.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are gunning to go public before the end of the year. And there’s a lot to gain from convincing investors that you’re the conjurer of a mightier spiritual force than your competitors — even if reality is far more mundane than that.
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