Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images
Anthropic’s S-1 drummed up comparisons to a religious text.
The CEO of a faith-based investing firm says he’s cautious, but hopeful, on the future of AI.
Initial public offerings are not usually occurrences that stoke religious debate, but most companies that go public are also not tinkering with ideas about the nature of consciousness itself.
Maybe that is why Anthropic’s S-1 prospectus invited comparisons to a religious text . Where SpaceX’s IPO filing was a sci-fi manifesto , the Claude maker’s document stirred a sense of religious fervor in some who parsed its 300 pages.
Robert Netzly, the CEO of faith-based investment firm Inspire Investing, is not among those who felt that way.
“Claude is not Jesus” Netzly told Business Insider. “It is not the savior of the universe.”
Netzly’s firm conducts a “moral audit” of every potential investment, a process that consists of screening companies to ensure that they align with biblically responsible investing standards. SpaceX stock didn’t meet this criteria, largely due to xAI’s lack of guardrails around graphic content creation.
When it comes to Anthropic, though, Netzly says Inspire feels better about it, at least for now.
Robert Netzly, CEO of Inspire Investing, says that “Claude is not Jesus.”
Inspire Investing
“The jury’s still out whether we would encourage people to invest in Anthropic’s IPO, but at least in that particular category, they have restrictions and safeguards around pornographic content and keeping that off of their software,” he told Business Insider. “That’s a big deal for us, and it’s those sort of things that we’re looking at when we make investment decisions.”
When Anthropic published its S-1 filing in October, many investors focused on the numbers it revealed. But for some, the unexpected biblical parallels stood out more, such as wanting to “bring forth an age of miracles” and referring, rather apocalyptically, to “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” posed by the technology it is creating.
Netzly said he finds this ironic, and he doesn’t approve of the framing employed by Anthropic. That said, he also sees a potential motive behind it that some investors may have missed.
“I think what they’re trying to say, in religiously robed rhetoric , is that they’re trying to get people of faith to embrace AI because they probably realize that group is among the most skeptical about AI and the evils that it could produce.”
He added that if that is indeed Anthropic’s intention, he sees the value in it, and that other faith-based investors should always remain alert and vigilant when it comes to new technologies. In his view, it doesn’t help anyone if only people with bad intentions harness the power of AI.
Netzly has previously written about the role that fear plays in investing, noting that it has become a factor in faith-based investing as new technology can be potentially destructive. However, he doesn’t buy into the AI doomsday scenarios that have percolated recently.
“The Bible has a lot to say about fear,” he said. “In our faith-based approach, we really encourage investors to keep that in mind. In this case, an AI ‘Age of Ultron’ scenario unfolding could be reality. That really could happen. But we also know that God controls the future. People would be foolish to plan for human extinction.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
