Anthropic employees exhibit cult-like devotion to AI model Claude

At most tech companies, employees rally around stock options, product launches, or maybe a really good espresso machine. At Anthropic, they rally around the existential fate of humanity. The AI safety firm behind Claude, now valued between $350 billion and $380 billion, has developed an internal culture so mission-driven that outside observers are struggling to distinguish it from religious fervor. Employees describe their work in terms that sound less like software engineering and more like spiritual calling, with many citing the prevention of AI catastrophe as their primary reason for showing up each day. Vision quests and soul documents CEO Dario Amodei holds company-wide sessions every two weeks called “Dario Vision Quests,” or DVQs. These are structured philosophical discussions about AI alignment, the societal implications of artificial intelligence, and how Anthropic’s work fits into a broader moral framework. Claude itself operates under what insiders call a “soul document,” an 80-page constitution that governs the model’s behavior and allows it to refuse directives it deems unethical. Rather than simply training a model to be helpful, Anthropic has attempted to encode some...