{"id":1526,"date":"2026-08-17T07:09:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T07:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1526"},"modified":"2026-08-17T07:09:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T07:09:18","slug":"ai-morality-and-effective-altruism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1526","title":{"rendered":"AI, Morality, and Effective Altruism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This past week, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> ran a long profile of Cami Clark, the wife of Dario Amodei, the AI savant and CEO of Anthropic. Clark, you see, keeps a very low profile, so low that even Claude, Anthropic\u2019s AI bot, didn\u2019t know she and Amodei were married\u2014a fact reported by the Journal<\/em> and confirmed by Claude itself. According to the paper, the reality of the marriage is significant for a number of reasons. Clark was previously in a two-year relationship with Eric Schmidt, for example, whom she introduced to Amodei and who became an early investor in Anthropic and the AI revolution. Additionally, and more provocatively, Clark once tried to start a \u201cluxury\u201d porn company and sought financial backing for the endeavor from Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n

Read more The Country We Forgot to Rebuild<\/a><\/p>\n

For my money, however, the key revelation in the profile appears in what might otherwise be seen as a throwaway paragraph describing how Clark and Amodei ran in the same Silicon Valley circles, even before officially becoming a couple. \u201cClark,\u201d the Journal<\/em> notes, \u201cspent time at the group house in San Francisco where Amodei, his friend\u00a0Holden Karnofsky\u00a0and his sister, Daniela\u2014who would later marry Karnofsky\u2014lived with other key figures from the AI safety and Effective Altruism worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past few years\u2014and especially over the past few months\u2014various religious leaders, moral scholars, and others have debated the ethical questions surrounding AI and its broader moral implications. On May 25 of this year, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical as the Roman Pontiff, Magnifica Humanitas<\/em>, which addressed those very questions in detail, focusing on human dignity, AI\u2019s lack thereof, and the importance of maintaining that dignity in interactions with all technology. The encyclical was reasonably well received by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, albeit with some serious and notable critiques.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most relevant critique was the Vatican\u2019s conscious choice to unveil the encyclical at a formal event that, in addition to several Catholic theologians, featured a man named Chris Olah. Olah is a co-founder of Anthropic and the head of the company\u2019s interpretability research. His presence and Anthropic\u2019s efforts to publicize the encyclical and its rollout all gave the impression that Magnifica Humanitas<\/em> was \u201cco-branded\u201d in some way with an AI company. Although the Vatican was adamant that Anthropic had no input into the encyclical or its moral arguments, Olah\u2019s presence was still strange, to say the very least. As my friend and colleague, Jerry Bowyer (the CEO of Bowyer Research and a well-respected author on Christian moral issues), pointed out in a handful of posts on Twitter\/X, Olah\u2019s attendance at the event created a perception problem for Pope Leo: \u201cInviting a man with a history of anti-Christian trolling who believes that AI has a soul from a company which has been dubbed a security risk by the US government seems like it will, whether intened [sic] or not, put a political spin on this. Why Anthropic? Why any AI vendor?\u201d<\/p>\n

These questions\u2014\u201cWhy Anthropic? Why any AI vendor?\u201d\u2014take on increased relevance and seriousness in light of the profile of Cami Clark. Among other things, the profile serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley in general, AI in particular, and Anthropic specifically are, as hinted at above, closely tied to the Effective Altruism movement.<\/p>\n

One could write an entire book on the connections between Anthropic and EA. The following is but a small sampling of how close those ties are and always have been:<\/p>\n