Carmody Grey, the philosopher who said no to Anthropic: ‘We are becoming lonelier and less intelligent’

Anthropic contacted theologian and philosopher Carmody Grey, a 43-year-old professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands. The company behind the chatbot Claude wanted to invite her to San Francisco to take part in something called a “research partnership with wisdom traditions” to “help inform the moral formation of AI systems.”

After several conversations, Grey said no. Her decision surprised her colleagues. What ordinary human turns down these giants that aspire to dominate the world? Grey recounted the experience in a lengthy essay for the Financial Times. But what she considers most important is not her decision about Anthropic, but the seemingly unstoppable global advance of AI. “I want to talk about the user, about addiction and dehumanization, about new forms of violence and exploitation,” says Grey.

In a conversation with EL PAÍS, she explains why it is a problem for big AI companies to impose their narrative and how that can be avoided. Ultimately, Grey writes, “it exists to sell a product.” That is why, she adds, it is so important to change the questions we ask when talking about AI: “We have to think about its effects,” and those effects are many. “It concentrates power, blurs responsibility, strips nature bare, expropriates cultures and languages for profit and will probably make us lonelier and less intelligent,” she says.

Question. Anthropic proposed collaborating with “wisdom traditions.” That sounds weird.

Answer. It is weird. The way it was framed was suspect from the start. Which tradition had said it wanted to be partners with Anthropic? That kind of presumption troubled me from the outset. They contacted me to see if I would be interested in attending a meeting in San Francisco. Then we had an initial conversation in which I shared some initial thoughts and they formally invited me. I had a long think. I spoke with several colleagues, reflected deeply, and decided I could not do it.

Q. Why?

A. Because of this sense that it was a behind-closed-doors invitation, on their territory and on their terms.

Q. Were they trying to hire you?

A. I doubt it. They had already been told I was critical and I immediately said I would not collaborate.

Q. There are many headlines about AI companies hiring philosophers. Is the interest sincere or self-interested?

A. The people I spoke with at Anthropic were impressive and I am sure they were in good faith. I liked them and respected them. I felt genuine sadness when I decided to step away.

Q. Were they philosophers or computer scientists?

A. I can’t answer that. But they were from the highest level. They had a genuine interest in philosophical inquiry. Then, at some companies such as Google, they do genuinely want people who have ethical expertise. But in other places, there is such an evident commercial interest in using philosophy to sell the product that it’s inescapable that their approach to the humanities becomes instrumental. They may be conscious of that or not. I am sure some are, especially those more on the business end. They have a very sophisticated PR machine and they know how to create a public narrative of intellectual and moral seriousness.

Q. And the philosophers who sign on to an AI company — have they sold out or do they believe it?

A. If someone who studied philosophy decides to go work for an AI company, at least it is clear whose interests their work is now serving. I would not do it. But if someone decides to, that is their choice. They should not call themselves philosophers, though, but rather say “I trained in philosophy, but now I work in an AI company.” The important thing is that it be clear whom their work serves. Doing work that in reality serves corporate interests, disguised as academic neutrality: that is what you have to watch out for. It is clear academic work is never entirely pure or disinterested, but that should not prevent it from striving for as much objectivity and independence as possible.

Q. Is there any collaboration between AI and the humanities that you would endorse?

A. Yes. I believe passionately in engagement between the academy and the wider world. When I turned down the invitation to San Francisco, I made a counterproposal. I invited those individuals from Anthropic to have a conversation with me on the BBC. They did not accept. So I absolutely did not refuse to engage. I strongly believe in dialogue; philosophy lives by dialogue. I proposed what I thought was the most constructive way to have an authentic dialogue: transparent, accountable, trustworthy and on neutral ground.

Q. It is still hard to understand why these companies are so eager to talk with philosophers and theologians.

A. The positive version is that they are clever people. They have realized AI is existential and raises questions at the most fundamental level about what a human being is, what a machine is, where the boundary is, what consciousness is.

Q. But that’s an interpretation.

A. Exactly. I am giving their version. They also realize that the way this technology is deployed is enormously consequential for the human future. And they therefore want to speak with people whose specialty it is to deal with existential and moral questions. That is the formal rationale for involving people like me. A bit like a government that has an ethics adviser. However, in practice they have already decided in advance which philosophical questions we should ask. They are questions that invite us to focus ever more philosophical attention on the product. But it is the wrong focus. The most urgent moral and philosophical questions raised by AI are not about AI itself. They are about AI’s effects on people and the planet, power, accountability, addiction, loneliness and our capacity to value our humanity.

Q. The questions Anthropic was putting to you were more along the lines of whether AI is a new kind of entity, whether a large language model has character, or whether it can suffer.

A. Many academics believe those are the important questions. I would rather ask: should we be anthropomorphizing Claude, to begin with? But it seemed to me they did not want to have that conversation. Let me give you an example: imagine that we have a conversation about race. And someone says: “The important question is whether a person of another race is really human.” Even if the answer we all come up with is yes, it is clear that person wanted to sow doubt, and that reveals their underlying attitude. You already show how you think simply by the question you ask. That is the key. The question creates the conversation. If the conversation you want to have is about Claude, of course you ask whether Claude is conscious. If Claude is your product, that is the appropriate question. But what if we asked a completely different question: who benefits from the development, design, promotion and storytelling around large language model technology? Who does it harm? Those questions lead to different conversations. The real contribution of the humanities is to make sure we ask the right questions. It is not just about coming up with the right answers but about ensuring we have the right conversation, one that truly serves the common good. And when philosophers go to work for an AI company, they must accept that the company will determine which question should be asked.

Q. That is why you say the merit of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI is that it changes the subject.

A. Exactly. We need to change the subject. AI is not the issue. The human is the issue.

Q. But not even the Pope has managed to change the subject. We keep talking about AI in Silicon Valley terms.

A. I would have liked to write the essay without mentioning Anthropic. I did not choose the headline “The philosopher who turned down Anthropic.” I would genuinely like to discuss philosophical questions directly, on their own terms, without having to justify them by referring to what happened with Anthropic. But I could not, because current affairs do not work that way.

Q. That is clear.

A. Silicon Valley knows how to dominate the headlines. They have an exceptional PR machine. They know how to make the conversation about them. Of course I would like to be part of change. Not all conversation needs to pass through Silicon Valley. In fact, it should not. We need humanities scholars, and ordinary people too, to exercise their own judgment, free and independent. I do not want to be talking about Anthropic all the time. It is not the conversation we should be having. We need to talk about people. About their dignity, their suffering, their vulnerabilities. And we need to talk about this planet and what our technologies are doing to it. Most important: we cannot let AI distract us from more important questions. The most serious existential threat is not AI. It is global warming and the destruction of nature. If Silicon Valley keeps steering the conversation toward AI, we will die by distraction. We will be like the driver fixing something on the dashboard while the car crashes.

Q. Were your colleagues stunned when you said no?

A. They were surprised, yes. The first draft of the essay was not personal about Anthropic. The FT asked me to include it, presumably because they know how to sell newspapers. I did not write it to promote myself. It was not meant to be about me.

Q. Five years from now, how will we know whether the humanities rose to the occasion or allowed themselves to be co-opted?

A. At the most obvious level, universities and intellectuals must maintain complete independence. When AI companies share their research, academics should be as skeptical as they are when fossil fuel companies share research on energy. This is not the same as saying they should not talk with AI companies. Of course there should be active, real and sincere dialogue. But it cannot be a dialogue on the terms set by AI companies: behind closed doors, asking and answering the questions they choose. The other sign, and this would be total success, would be that the debate we have about AI begins to ask different questions: what makes a human life meaningful? What makes it beautiful? How does AI contribute to that, or how does it undermine it? Is it making us more human or less?

Q. Why do you try to avoid contact with chatbots?

A. I use them very occasionally, usually to translate something if I do not have a real person at hand to do it. But I avoid using them routinely, even when they would be very useful. When I tell people my position, they roll their eyes and think it discredits my whole argument. But my response is simple. Imagine there were a robot that meant you never had to stand up. It would bring you everything, take you everywhere, do everything for you. Gradually, you would lose your physical abilities. Many uses of AI have the same effect on our brains and our capacity to relate. We are becoming lonelier and less intelligent. It is highly corrosive to our intelligence. With technology, we do not notice opportunity costs.

In the case of chatbots, they are invisible but devastating. Who are you not talking to? What relationships are you not having? What books are you not reading? What places are you not going? Which of your faculties are dying for lack of use? What life-giving habits are you losing? And if, by losing all that, you are in some way losing the very meaning of life? Human life is made of relationship. Relationship with others, with the natural world, with ourselves and also with something sacred that some call God. Those relationships are the key to fulfillment. AI puts them at risk. I would like us to have a conversation about how we can help those relationships flourish. That is a conversation not only for philosophers and theologians, but for everyone.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition