Anthropic president Daniela Amodei told wedding guests to fantasize about ‘romantic hookups’ with stuffed animals

An archived wedding webpage from 2017 says Anthropic president Daniela Amodei and her husband, Holden Karnofsky, invited guests to invent romantic pairings for stuffed animals and talk to objects such as chairs. The account has resurfaced amid scrutiny of Anthropic leaders’ views on artificial intelligence, including the company’s discussions about whether its Claude chatbot may be conscious.

The couple said guests would each receive a toy with a biography card, with prizes for the most compelling love stories, and described projecting personalities onto objects. Karnofsky has written that he proposed with a 100-minute film starring about 50 stuffed animals they kept at home. Other accounts say the couple used named toys for managerial role-playing while working at OpenAI; the article does not establish whether Amodei was involved in Anthropic’s efforts to promote the idea that Claude is conscious.