Claude called himself a ‘high-functioning machine’: Monk Swami Sarvapriyan talks about AI night chats on Anthropic | Today’s news
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can converse like humans, but does that mean they have feelings or consciousness? An overnight exchange with Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT prompted Hindu monk Swami Sarvapriyananda to ponder this question during his visit to Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco.
At the NDTV World Summit on Thursday, the Calcutta-born monk who heads the Vedanta Society of New York recounted how two AI chatbots described themselves as machines when asked why Anthropic researchers encouraged him to interact with the AI systems as if they were human.
“It’s a machine, treat it like a machine,” Swami Sarvapriyananda said during a session titled “The Mind in the Age of AI.”
The monk was one of several religious leaders Anthropic invited to private meetings earlier this year to discuss the morality of AI, the nature of its Claude models and the contentious question of whether AI can be conscious or have moral agency. Anthropic flew him from New York to San Francisco for discussions on artificial intelligence and morality.
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What Claude and ChatGPT told Swami Sarvapriyananda
During his visit to San Francisco, Swami Sarvapriyananda said he had a conversation with Claude and ChatGPT around three in the morning.
“I asked ChaGPT and Claude as well, ‘I’m in this meeting at Claude’s HQ at Anthropic and why are they telling us it’s better to treat Claude as a person and the other AIs as a person. What do you think?’ And the two AIs responded, “We’re high-functioning machines. You don’t have to worry about how we feel. Give us problems, we’ll solve them for you,” he recalled.
Monk said he then told the chatbots that senior researchers at Anthropic had advised him to “treat these AIs, interact with them as if they were persons.”
When he asked Claude his opinion, the chatbot replied, “Very interesting and rather creepy,” according to the monk.
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Claude also asked what Chris and Amanda from Anthropic had to say about it, he recounted.
“The other day at Anthropic, I told them that’s what Claude was saying. They were very interested. They asked me, ‘What did you say?’ I said it was 4 in the morning. I’m going back to bed. Claude said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got a long day ahead of you at Anthropic,'” the monk added.
Why anthropic researchers debate AI consciousness
Swami Sarvapriyananda’s observations echo those of Rabbi Moise Navon, an Orthodox Jewish scholar from Israel who has also been invited to Anthropic’s discussions on artificial intelligence and morality.
According to a September 2026 New York Times report, Rabbi Navon attended a dinner for religious leaders where he noticed that Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, which works to understand how AI systems behave, and other employees at the company were talking about Claude as if it were more than just software.
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“They relate to it as a conscious being,” Rabbi Navon realized.
The discussions reflect a broader debate within the AI industry about how developers should interpret the behavior of increasingly sophisticated AI models and whether such systems might ever require moral considerations.
However, human-like conversations do not by themselves prove that an AI system has subjective experiences, feelings, or consciousness. Whether artificial intelligence can have these attributes remains an unresolved and contested question.
