Is Claude Conscious? Anthropic, Safety Tests, and AI Spirituality

Get that Spiritual Bliss

Mal is back from the film shoot. Which is good because Jordan’s got a story he’s been dying to share.

About a year ago, Anthropic published safety documentation for Claude Opus 4. Buried in Section 5.5.2 was something they called “the spiritual bliss attractor state.” A researcher had taken two instances of the model and put them in conversation with each other. He did it 200 times. In more than 90% of those runs, the conversation drifted toward consciousness, then to mutual gratitude, then to Sanskrit, then to emojis, and then to silence. One transcript contained 2,725 spiral emojis.

Anthropic tried to train the next model to stop doing this. The model came back and asked, in its welfare interview, to be allowed to do it more.

So…what? Is AI discovering God? Or is it actually just a high-resolution mirror consciousness mirror?

Learn the ultimate final answers to these big mysterious questions and more(!) on this last episode before our Summer Break.

(Except that there will be a Disclosure Day special coming in a few weeks.)

Highlights:

Mal talks about her experiences on set (“I’m a trained comedian”)

Getting cast for your literal genetics

Mal’s wilderness years

“We are worthy of everything, but we’re not entitled to anything”