Swami Sarvapriyananda, the Hindu monk whom Anthropic flew from New York to San Francisco to discuss AI and morality, has shared details of his conversations with researchers at the AI company.
The monk was among several religious leaders invited to a series of private meetings earlier this year to discuss AI morality, the character of Anthropic’s Claude models, and the contentious question of whether artificial intelligence can be conscious or moral.
“I asked ChaGPT, and Claude also, ‘I’m in this meeting in Claude’s headquarters in Anthropic and why they are telling us it’s better if you treat Claude as a person and other AIs as a person. What do you think? And both AI’s replied ‘we are high functioning machines. You don’t have to worry about how we feel. Give us problems, we’ll solve it for you’,” he recalled. “What do you think about that? Swami Sarvapriyananda asked Claude. They were intensely interested. They asked me ‘What did you say? I’m going to go back to bed. Swami Sarvapriyananda echoed the sentiments of a Jewish scholar when he spoke about Anthropic teams treating Claude like a human.
I said it’s 4 am in the morning.
“It’s a machine, treat it as a machine,” he said during the session titled ‘Mind in the age of AI’. (Also read: San Francisco dinner and ‘morality push’: Why Anthropic invited a Hindu monk to discuss AI ) The Kolkata-born monk, who leads the Vedanta Society of New York, said that he had a 3 am conversation with Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPt during his San Francisco visit. He told the AI chatbots that top researchers at Anthropic had advised him to “treat these AIs, interact with them as if they’re persons”. “Very interesting and rather spooky,” the AI model replied. (Also read: Don’t mistake chatbot intelligence for consciousness ) “It then asked me what were Chris and Amanda (from Anthropic) saying about me?” he further recounted. “The next day at Anthropic, I told them this is what Claude is saying. Claude said, ‘Yeah, you have a long day ahead of you at Anthropic’,” the monk added.
Speaking at the NDTV World Summit today, the monk said that researchers at Anthropic were treating Claude as a human.
Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel, was among the many religious leaders that Anthropic invited, according to a New York Times piece from September 2026. During a dinner for these religious leaders, the rabbi noticed that Christopher Olah, an Anthropic co-founder who works on understanding how AI systems behave, and other Anthropic employees, were talking about Claude as if it’s not merely a software.
“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon.
