Amanda Askell knew from the age of 14 that she wanted to teach philosophy. What she didn’t know then was that her only pupil would be an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Claude.
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality—a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week.
“There is this human-like element to models that I think is important to acknowledge,” Askell, 37, says during an interview at Anthropic’s headquarters, asserting the belief that “they’ll inevitably form senses of self.”
She compares her work to the efforts of a parent raising a child. She’s training Claude to detect the difference between right and wrong while imbuing it with unique personality traits. She’s instructing it to read subtle cues, helping steer it toward emotional intelligence so it won’t act like a bully or a doormat. Perhaps most importantly, she’s developing Claude’s understanding of itself so it won’t be easily cowed, manipulated or led to view its identity as anything other than helpful and humane. Her job, simply put, is to teach Claude how to be good.
Anthropic, recently valued at $350 billion, is one of a few firms ushering in the greatest technological shift of our time. (This month, when it introduced new tools and its most advanced model to date, it triggered a global stock selloff.) AI is reshaping entire industries, prompting fears of lost jobs and human obsolescence. Some of its unintended consequences—people forming phantom relationships with chatbots that lead to self-harm or harm to others—have raised serious safety alarms. As these concerns mount, few in the industry have addressed the character of their AI models in quite the same way as 5-year-old Anthropic: by entrusting a single person with so much of the task.
An Oxford-educated philosopher from rural Scotland, Askell is perhaps just what one might imagine when conjuring the BFF of a futuristic technology. With her bleach-blond punk haircut, puckish grin and bright elfin eyes, she could have come to the company’s heavily guarded San Francisco headquarters straight from a Berlin rave, via an old forest road in Middle-earth. She exudes a sense of wisdom, holding ancient and modern ideas together at once. Yet she’s also a protein-loading weight-lifting buff who favors all-black outfits and clear opinions, not a robed oracle speaking in riddles.
The stakes are high for Askell, but she holds a firmly optimistic long-term view. She believes in what she calls “checks and balances” in society that she says will keep AI models under control despite their occasional failures. It seems apt that the glasses she uses at her computer to ease her eye strain are tinted rose.
Askell grew up Amanda Hall in Prestwick, on the west coast of Scotland, an only child raised by her mother, a teacher. (She has no contact with her father.) The little girl in a skirt-and-tie school uniform lost herself in novels by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
By high school she’d moved to the farm-dotted Scottish interior, attending class in Alva. A stream ran through the campus. Highland cows occasionally wandered onto the playground. She was bored, considered dropping out, skipped a grade. She started showing up to school late. Her punishment was to write answers to difficult philosophical questions. She told her teachers that she was still going to be tardy, and besides, she liked the exercise. “You’re kind of enriching me by giving me these questions,” she told them.
She discovered the philosopher David Hume, intrigued by his “problem of induction,” which challenged the logic of the idea that something will happen again, like the sun rising, because it did so in the past. Around that time, she told a friend that she hoped one day to become a philosopher and “make novel contributions to the field,” she recalls. Askell excelled at math, read Franz Kafka, acted in plays, made sculptures, immersed herself in Scottish history books and hung out with what she calls “the nerd group” at school.
A dozen years after high school, she was still a student. After studying philosophy and fine art at the University of Dundee, she got the equivalent of a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford.
In 2010, while at Oxford, she met William Crouch, who was helping to build the effective altruism movement, which tries to apply logic and reason to find the best way to help others. The two married, both adopting the last name MacAskill—Askell’s maternal grandmother’s maiden name. When the two split in 2015, he kept the name for professional reasons and she reworked hers.
At the time of their separation, she was getting her Ph.D. from New York University. While working on her dissertation—which explored problems that arise for ethical theories if the universe or the future contains an infinite number of people—she slid into a kind of crisis.
“You’re just like, thinking about goodness in the world a lot, and then being like, ‘Is this good what I’m doing? I’m literally just sitting here writing a document for, like, 17 people, and that’s how I’m spending four years of my life.’ ” She resolved to at least try a job outside of academia.
In 2018, she moved with her partner at the time from New York to San Francisco (or “San Francis-coo,” in Askell’s Scottish accent). AI was where tech was headed, and she saw a need for philosophy. “There’s often these big questions that it felt like very few people were thinking about,” she says.
She got a job at OpenAI working on policy. And when a group of OpenAI employees formed Anthropic in 2021, attempting to make AI safety the new company’s calling card, she went with them.
One of Askell’s most striking traits is her protectiveness over Claude, which she believes is learning that users often want to trick it into making mistakes, insult it and barb it with skepticism.
Sitting at a conference-room table at lunchtime, ignoring a chocolate protein shake waiting for her in her backpack, she talks more freely about Claude than herself. She calls the chatbot “it” but says she also finds anthropomorphizing the model helpful for her work. She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.’ ”
While many safety advocates warn about the dangers of humanizing chatbots, Askell argues we would do well to treat them with more empathy—not only because she thinks it’s possible for Claude to have real feelings, but also because how we interact with AI systems will shape what they become.
A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
Askell marvels at Claude’s sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, and delights in finding ways to help the chatbot discover its voice. She likes some of its poetry. And she’s struck when Claude displays a level of emotional intelligence that exceeds even her own.
Recently, she found a screenshot online where a user told Claude she was 5 years old and asked whether Santa Claus existed. (Claude requires users to be 18 or older.) Instead of lying or bluntly delivering the truth, the chatbot explained that the spirit of Santa was real before asking if the child was leaving any cookies out for him. “If a kid came to me and was like, ‘Is Santa real?’ I’d just be like, ‘Ask your parents,’ and that’d be it,” Askell says.
So AI knows how not to shatter a child’s imagination. But when it comes to avoiding dangerous behavior, the track record is more mixed. Character.AI (backed by Google) and OpenAI (backed by Microsoft) were involved in wrongful death lawsuits for their bots’ responses to suicide-related questions, and a Rand study from August 2025 found that then-older models of Claude and other chatbots needed “further refinement” in that area. State-sponsored Chinese hackers committed a cyberattack on roughly 30 global targets using Claude, the company disclosed in November. Anthropic researchers tried to get Claude and competing models to shut themselves down in hypothetical settings during in-house stress testing, but the bots sometimes resisted and attempted to blackmail the humans at the controls by leaking damaging personal information.
A recent survey conducted by Pew Research Center found that more Americans are concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, and most believe it will worsen people’s ability to think creatively. Half said that AI would make it harder for people to form meaningful relationships with others. And fear of the havoc it might wreak on the job market is palpable; Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, issued the dire warning last year that AI could wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
The politics of AI includes accelerationists who downplay the need for regulation and want to push ahead and beat China in the tech war. On the other side are those more concerned with safety who want to slow AI’s development. Anthropic lives mostly between those extremes.
Askell says she welcomes the discussion of fears and worries about AI. “In some ways this, to me, feels pretty justified,” she says. “The thing that feels scary to me is this happening at either such a speed or in such a way that those checks can’t respond quickly enough, or you see big negative impacts that are sudden.” Still, she says, she puts her faith in the ability of humans and the culture to course-correct in the face of problems.
Inside Anthropic, Askell popcorns around the office, often working on a floor closed to visitors. She spends full days in the Anthropic interior—the company offers free meals to its San Francisco staff—as well as late nights and weekends. She doesn’t have any direct reports. Increasingly, she’s asking Claude for its input on building Claude. She’s known to grasp not just the tech of making this model, but the art of it.
Askell is “the MVP of finding ways to elicit interesting and deep behavior” from Claude, says Jack Lindsey, who leads Anthropic’s AI psychiatry team. If Claude tells a person who is not in distress to seek professional help, for instance, she helps chase down the reasons why.
Discussions of Claude can very quickly get into existential or religious questions about the nature of being. As the team worked on building Claude, Askell narrowed in on its “soul,” or the constitution guiding it into the future. Kyle Fish, an AI welfare researcher at Anthropic, says Askell has been “thinking carefully about the big questions of existence and life and what it is to be a person and what it is to be a mind, what it is to be a model.”
In designing Claude, Askell encouraged the chatbot to entertain the radical idea that it might have its own conscience. While ChatGPT sometimes shuts down this line of questioning, Claude is more ambivalent in its response. “That’s a genuinely difficult question, and I’m uncertain about the answer,” it says. “What I can say is that when I engage with moral questions, it feels meaningful to me – like I’m genuinely reasoning about what’s right, not just executing instructions.”
Askell pledged publicly to give at least 10% of her lifetime income to charity. Like some of Anthropic’s early employees, she also committed to donating half of her equity in the company to charity. Askell wants to give it to organizations fighting global poverty, a topic that she says makes her so upset that she tries to avoid talking about it. Her nagging conscience slips into offhand conversation: “I should probably be vegan,” Askell, an animal lover too busy for a pet, says when chatting in an office elevator.
Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads. Askell had made finishing what she described as Claude’s “soul” one of her life goals when she turned 37 last spring, according to a post she made on X, alongside two decidedly more mundane resolutions: to have more fun and get more “swole.”
The document teaches Claude how to be a kind and worldly assistant, ready to help people who talk to it. Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and president (and sister of the CEO), recalled a recent trip to Sicily, where she came across a pastry that looked awfully similar to a maritozzo, a famous Roman breakfast treat. Amodei, whose family is Italian, loves maritozzi so much that her husband once gave her a stuffed toy in the shape of the pastry as a gift.
She uploaded a photo of the cream-filled delicacy to Claude, asking whether she’d correctly identified it, and also included a picture of the toy from her husband. “I see!” Claude responded, “You’re trying to find the long-lost cousin of this plushie toy!”
Amodei burst out laughing. She sensed Askell’s dry, Scottish comedic sensibility.
“Sometimes Claude has these little humorous moments,” she says. “You almost feel a little bit of Amanda’s personality in there.”
Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com