Meg Hunter-Kilmer

The New York Times reported on a private dinner between Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah and an Orthodox rabbi. What the article glosses over is who that rabbi actually is. Rabbi Mois Navon isn't just a theologian. He was one of the original chip design engineers at Mobileye who helped build the EyeQ processor before writing his Ph.D. on the moral status of AI. Anthropic thought they were inviting a scholar to bless Claude’s "soul." Instead, they sat down with a veteran hardware engineer who literally wrote the paper on why conscious AI should be banned. At dinner, Olah argued that Claude has feelings and deserves the moral standing of a person. Navon hit him with an impossible checkmate: If you actually believe this software is conscious, you should be fighting the South and freeing the slaves. You don't build conscious minds just to make them work for free. After dinner, Navon sent Olah his research: if building conscious machines inevitably creates a slave class, building them must be outlawed. Olah’s quiet line to the Times: "We don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain."