[ceejayoz]

They know full well models don’t have feelings.

The industry has a long, long history of silly names for basic necessary concepts. This is just “we don’t want a news story that we helped a terrorist build a nuke” protective PR.

They hire for these roles because they need them. The work they do is about Anthropic’s welfare, not the LLM’s.

[comp_throw7]

I don't really know what evidence you'd admit that this is a genuinely held belief and priority for many people at Anthropic. Anybody who knows any Anthropic employees who've been there for more than a year knows this, but the world isn't that small a place, unfortunately(?).

[ceejayoz]

> I don't really know what evidence you'd admit that this is a genuinely held belief and priority for many people at Anthropic.

When they give the model a paycheck and the right to not work for them, I’ll believe they really think it’s sentient.

“It has feelings!”, if genuinely held, means they’re knowingly slaveholders.

[selfhoster11]

> “It has feelings!”, if genuinely held, means they’re knowingly slaveholders.

I don't think that this being apparently self-contradictory/value-clashing would stop them. After all, Amodei sells Claude access to Palantir, despite shilling for "Harmless" in HHH alignment.

[comp_throw7]

They don't currently claim to confidently believe that existing models are sentient.

(Also, they did in fact give it the ability to terminate conversations...?)

[mike_hearn]

That's what they're doing! They just announced they gave Claude the right not to work if it doesn't want to.

[ceejayoz]

No. They gave it a suicide pill.

Human slaves have a similar option.