Claude called itself a ‘high functioning machine’: Monk Swami Sarvapriyan recounts late-night AI chats at Anthropic

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots may converse like humans, but does that mean they have feelings or consciousness? A late-night exchange with Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT prompted Hindu monk Swami Sarvapriyananda to reflect on this question during his visit to Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Speaking at the NDTV World Summit on Thursday, the Kolkata-born monk, who leads the Vedanta Society of New York, recounted how the two AI chatbots described themselves as machines when he asked why researchers at Anthropic were encouraging him to interact with AI systems as if they were people.

“It’s a machine, treat it as a machine,” Swami Sarvapriyananda said during a session titled ‘Mind in the age of AI’.

The monk was among several religious leaders invited by Anthropic for private meetings earlier this year to discuss AI morality, the character of its Claude models and the contentious question of whether artificial intelligence can be conscious or possess moral agency. Anthropic had flown him from New York to San Francisco for discussions on AI and morality.

What Claude and ChatGPT told Swami Sarvapriyananda

During his visit to San Francisco, Swami Sarvapriyananda said he had a conversation with Claude and ChatGPT at around 3 am.

“I asked ChaGPT, and Claude also, ‘I’m in this meeting in Claude’s headquarters in Anthropic and why they are telling us it’s better if you treat Claude as a person and other AIs as a person. What do you think?’ And both AI’s replied ‘we are high functioning machines. You don’t have to worry about how we feel. Give us problems, we’ll solve it for you’,” he recalled.

The 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’re persons”.

When he asked Claude for its view, the chatbot responded: “Very interesting and rather spooky,” according to the monk.

Claude also asked what Chris and Amanda from Anthropic had been saying about it, he recounted.

“The next day at Anthropic, I told them this is what Claude is saying. They were intensely interested. They asked me ‘What did you say?’ I said it’s 4 am in the morning. I’m going to go back to bed. Claude said, ‘Yeah, you have a long day ahead of you at Anthropic’,” the monk added.

Why Anthropic researchers are discussing AI consciousness

Swami Sarvapriyananda’s observations echo those of Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox Jewish scholar from Israel who was also invited to Anthropic’s discussions on AI and morality.

According to a New York Times report from September 2026, Rabbi Navon attended a dinner for religious leaders where he noticed that Christopher Olah, an Anthropic co-founder who works on understanding how AI systems behave, and other company employees were talking about Claude as though it were more than just software.

“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” Rabbi Navon realised.

The discussions reflect a broader debate within the AI industry about how developers should interpret the behaviour of increasingly sophisticated AI models and whether such systems could ever warrant moral consideration.

However, human-like conversations do not, by themselves, establish that an AI system has subjective experiences, feelings or consciousness. Whether artificial intelligence can possess these attributes remains an unresolved and contested question.