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How Anthropic used AI ethics slop to play the pope and eclipse OpenAI (Brian Merchant, 5/29/2026)
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-anthropic-used-its-ai-ethicslop-snip-
It has done this partly by building a popular product, partly by correctly recognizing which way the winds of public sentiment were blowing, partly out of luck, and also by being unabashedly full of shit. If you look back over the last few months, you’ll see a carefully plotted and heavily narrativized ascent built atop the corny and mostly untrue idea that Anthropic is made of sterner moral stuff than its rivals. The road to its triumph was paved on AI ethics slop. (AI ethicslop??)
-snip-
Anthropic saw that the window for a “ChatGPT that won’t tell your kids to kill themselves”—for an AI company that will put its head down, say the right things, and get to the business of selling mass automation software as promised—was wide open.3 It built a popular vibecoding and software automation product, cozied up to the pope, mugged for the cameras, and parlayed months of ethical AI theater into an eye-watering payday. It may be more disciplined than its chief rival, but each of the structural, environmental, and ethical issues that plague OpenAI plague Anthropic too. Anthropic is pursuing expansion as rapidly as possible; Anthropic pirated books and ripped off authors’ work without their consent; Anthropic is cutting deals with the Trump administration, and Elon Musk and SpaceX, and hitting the gas on the datacenter buildout. Anthropic is driving even harder to automate jobs and labor. The ethicslop it feeds to the press is ultimately about largely superficial.4
As Zitron put it, “I will give Dario Amodei credit: nobody does financial engineering and a press-led information war better than Anthropic.”
-snip-
So, I was initially planning on dedicating this week’s edition to exploring the pope’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as it really is a rich text that has a lot to say about technology, labor, and protecting the dignity of the human worker in the age of AI. Anthropic’s big week—and above-explored hijacking of the encyclical—threw a wrench in all that. Instead, I’ll just share some thoughts and some of the more powerful passages, because it is a fascinating document, and almost earns Leo XIV the designation of true luddite pope (complimentary, of course).
-snip-
It has done this partly by building a popular product, partly by correctly recognizing which way the winds of public sentiment were blowing, partly out of luck, and also by being unabashedly full of shit. If you look back over the last few months, you’ll see a carefully plotted and heavily narrativized ascent built atop the corny and mostly untrue idea that Anthropic is made of sterner moral stuff than its rivals. The road to its triumph was paved on AI ethics slop. (AI ethicslop??)
-snip-
Anthropic saw that the window for a “ChatGPT that won’t tell your kids to kill themselves”—for an AI company that will put its head down, say the right things, and get to the business of selling mass automation software as promised—was wide open.3 It built a popular vibecoding and software automation product, cozied up to the pope, mugged for the cameras, and parlayed months of ethical AI theater into an eye-watering payday. It may be more disciplined than its chief rival, but each of the structural, environmental, and ethical issues that plague OpenAI plague Anthropic too. Anthropic is pursuing expansion as rapidly as possible; Anthropic pirated books and ripped off authors’ work without their consent; Anthropic is cutting deals with the Trump administration, and Elon Musk and SpaceX, and hitting the gas on the datacenter buildout. Anthropic is driving even harder to automate jobs and labor. The ethicslop it feeds to the press is ultimately about largely superficial.4
As Zitron put it, “I will give Dario Amodei credit: nobody does financial engineering and a press-led information war better than Anthropic.”
-snip-
So, I was initially planning on dedicating this week’s edition to exploring the pope’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as it really is a rich text that has a lot to say about technology, labor, and protecting the dignity of the human worker in the age of AI. Anthropic’s big week—and above-explored hijacking of the encyclical—threw a wrench in all that. Instead, I’ll just share some thoughts and some of the more powerful passages, because it is a fascinating document, and almost earns Leo XIV the designation of true luddite pope (complimentary, of course).
-snip-
Much more at the link.
Anthropic is a slightly more ethical, or maybe more accurately ethical-aspirant, AI company than the others. Slightly less robber-baron, slightly less pro-autonomous-killer-bot, slightly less pro-sickeningly-sycophantic-chatbot, slightly less used-car-salesman-untrustworthy.
But still robber barons. Still not trustworthy.
Still more than happy to use Elon Musk's data centers that deserve their infamous reputation for spewing toxins into poor and mostly black neighborhoods.
Arguably the best of a bad bunch. But they're not going to save us from any of the very many harms from generative AI. No matter how much they want us to just trust them and view them as ethical.