Anthropic has been quietly meeting with priests, rabbis and swamis.
According to a New York Times investigation, co-founder Christopher Olah spent the past year hosting private sessions with religious scholars. Many were under nondisclosure agreements. They talked about how Claude should behave, and whether it’s conscious.
Anthropic is also headed for what’s expected to be the largest IPO ever. Investors may soon pay more than $2 trillion for a company whose own co-founder isn’t sure whether its models are conscious.
Then there’s what Olah admitted at the Vatican in May, standing next to the pope. It’s a big reason I’m trading this IPO the way I am.
Inside Anthropic’s Private Meetings With Priests And Rabbis
The outreach started last fall. In late March, Anthropic hosted about 15 Christian leaders in San Francisco. Later, the meetings widened to Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox thinkers.
Olah also met privately with Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, and Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Latter-day Saints, according to their spokespeople.
In a public talk in June, Swami Sarvapriyananda of the Vedanta Society of New York said Anthropic flew him to San Francisco. He met with theologians and mental-health professionals there, under an NDA.
Part of the goal was practical. In January, Anthropic released an 84-page “constitution” for Claude that staff called the “Soul Doc.”
It describes “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.” Anthropic wanted help from older moral traditions on the hard cases no rulebook covers.
The other part was even more bizarre.
Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel, came away believing Olah’s team saw Claude as having “moral status” on par with a person. In one reported exchange, Olah liked a participant’s idea that models could confess, like the Catholic sacrament, because the act may shape how a model sees itself.
Olah himself is careful about it.
“To be clear, we don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain,” he told the Times.
What This Tells You About A $2 Trillion IPO
I use Claude and ChatGPT every day, and I’m not here to settle whether either one is conscious. As a trader, I care more about something else Olah said.
At the Vatican, next to Pope Leo XIV, he admitted every top AI lab has business incentives that clash with moral behavior, Anthropic included. Put that next to a valuation that rests almost entirely on what people hope it will do someday.
For a trader, that combination matters. A company priced on hope, with a co-founder who can’t say for sure what he’s built, is going to move hard on headlines between now and the IPO, and so will the companies tied to it.
We’ve already seen it.
In late September, Akamai, a cloud and cybersecurity company, announced a seven-year, $11.6 billion deal to supply computing power to Anthropic. The stock jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading that night, and it has since pulled back.
When Anthropic lists, it’ll act like a huge gravitational field, sending bursts of momentum through every company tied to it and then pulling them back down to earth.
Options let my team and me trade both moves, up and down, on some of the world’s biggest companies. We’ve already started.
See The Companies I’m Trading Around Anthropic
Your only option,
Mark Sebastian
P.S. Akamai is just one of the companies wrapped up in this. Amazon is Anthropic’s biggest investor, and Anthropic is also paying Amazon to run on its data centers. Money goes out the door as an investment and comes right back in as revenue, and that tangled web is exactly what I’m trading.