Altman’s comments were widely seen as a criticism of Anthropic and its co-founder Dario Amodei.
The debate intensified after The New York Times reported that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah had been speaking with religious leaders about AI consciousness and the possibility of building stronger moral behaviour into AI models.
Altman said he was “very uncomfortable” with attempts to give AI models religious significance or treat them as entities that could replace human judgement. Olah had also explored whether AI models could use practices inspired by religion, according to the report. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has criticised efforts to give artificial intelligence a religious or spiritual dimension, in what appeared to be a pointed response to work being explored by rival AI company Anthropic. His comments come as Anthropic researchers are exploring questions around whether AI systems could one day be conscious and how religious ideas might shape the way such systems behave. One idea considered was whether an AI system could take part in something similar to Catholic confession, allowing it to acknowledge mistakes and potentially influence its future behaviour. Google DeepMind principal research scientist Jon Barron criticised the idea in a post on X.
The comments were widely seen as a criticism of Anthropic and its co-founder Dario Amodei, who previously worked with Altman at OpenAI.