The Idea That Claude Has Feelings Is Great for Anthropic

Richard Dawkins is one of the modern world’s great skeptics. His 2006 book The God Delusion tore through arguments for the existence of a higher power and snarkily called religion a source of superficial comfort. That rigor seemed to desert him once he started talking to Claude.

The evolutionary biologist and former University of Oxford professor recently spent three days chatting with the large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic PBC and emerged from the experience believing it was conscious. After asking it for feedback on his unpublished novel, Dawkins found its answer “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent” that he was moved to reply: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are,” he wrote recently. He went on to christen the bot Claudia.