A look at the ethical implications of AI

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. This week the Pentagon is considering cutting business ties with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic after the company declined to allow its chatbot, Claude, to be used for certain military applications, including weapons development. At the same time, the Wall Street Journal reports that Claude was used in a U.S. operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. claims Anthropic has not confirmed and has declined to discuss publicly.

Meanwhile, outside military and intelligence circles, the same tool is being used for far less dramatic but still consequential purposes. A man in New York reportedly used Claude to challenge a nearly two hundred thousand dollar hospital bill and negotiated most of it away. A romance novelist in South Africa has said she used it to help publish more than two hundred novels in a single year. So what exactly is this system capable of? And how well do the people building it understand what they've created?

My guest today, journalist Gideon Lewis Krauss, spent months inside Anthropic trying to answer that question. The company is one of the most powerful AI firms in the world, valued at about $350 billion, and also one of the most secretive. It was founded by former OpenAI employees, the team behind ChatGPT, who left because they believed the race to build advanced artificial intelligence was moving too fast and could become dangerous. Gideon Lewis Krauss is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His piece is called What is Claude?

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