Trump fired Anthropic for being 'leftwing nut jobs,' but the company's AI is conquering the internet

An artificial intelligence company has one philosopher in charge of teaching its chatbot right and wrong, and now her views are everywhere.

That person is Scottish immigrant Amanda Askell, who holds degrees from Oxford and NYU. Askell is in charge of the moral leanings of Claude, the state-of-the-art chatbot from Anthropic — the leading AI company Trump banned from government work for “radical left, woke” politics.

Despite the White House crackdown, however, Anthropic’s products are dominating the tech sector and transforming the economic landscape, and Askell’s indoctrination of Claude is spreading through the internet as its powerful applications become an emerging industry standard.

‘Respecting others’ values can also be harmful. Navigating this is hard.’

Askell, formerly MacAskill from a previous marriage (since divorced), is the woman who teaches chatbot Claude how to be “a good person.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Askell is instructing the AI on how to read subtle cues and to avoid being a bully or “doormat,” and she compares her work to that of a parent raising a child.

To that end, X owner Elon Musk — who is indeed a competitor with his own xAI — criticized Askell as the company’s choice.

“Those without children lack a stake in the future,” Musk wrote in February.

Askell replied, “I think it depends on how much you care about people in general vs. your own kin. I do intend to have kids, but I still feel like I have a strong personal stake in the future because I care a lot about people thriving, even if they’re not related to me.”

Musk shut her down, though, stating that Askell cannot understand his point until she has a child, “anymore than someone who has never experienced true love can understand love.”

Askell is not shy about bringing her philosophical or political leanings into the public spotlight for open discourse, and although she displays obvious liberal leanings, it would be hard to label her as unwilling to engage in debate.

She has often discussed ethics and morals of AI bots throughout her time with OpenAI and Anthropic, publicly posing questions about navigating cultural viewpoints for a worldwide product.

“It’s easy to say you want technology to respect local values when those values are unobjectionable,” she wrote in 2021. “It’s harder when they include things like persecuting gay people. Imposing your values can be harmful. Respecting others’ values can also be harmful. Navigating this is hard.”

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Also in 2021, Askell praised the vaccination rate in San Francisco. Four years later, she seemed to call out some of the vaccine side effects:

“Getting a covid vaccine is like a surreal religious experience of chills and pain and fever dreams where you feel like you’ve lived a decade in a single night and gazed into something absurd and otherworldly. As a bonus, it also makes you less susceptible to covid,” she claimed.

She even referred to her dosage, albeit jokingly, as the “mind-bending RNA vaccine.”

Askell has also engaged in discussions surrounding reparations and said she supported governments paying off the debt for those of certain ethnicities.

“It seems more sensible for governments to underwrite some amount of debt from historically disadvantaged groups like black people in the US,” she claimed. “That way you try to prevent social harms from perpetuating without legislating the burden onto a specific industry.”

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Askell has also frequently discussed immigration, and in addition to saying how difficult the process has been for her in the United States, she has noted an increased intolerance for illegal immigration from both sides of the political aisle.

“Legal and illegal immigration seem to basically be entirely different policy domains and I’m not sure why they get lumped together,” she wrote on X in late 2024. “Americans dislike illegal immigration but are surprisingly supportive of legal immigration.”

Askell’s views are now being disseminated throughout the world through OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot), an open-source AI bot that users are downloading for their own use to do their own bidding. This can happen locally on one’s computer, be unleashed online, or both.

It is, to borrow a ’90s analogy, the first burned CD of the AI chatbot world, based on Anthropic’s Claude; and now it is everywhere, perpetuating Askell’s views.

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