Anthropic’s President Warns Against One Popular Use of AI

You get the good morning text. Then the question about how your meeting went and the reassurance after a bad day. Your partner always seems to know what to say. There’s just one catch: You’re dating an AI chatbot. 

AI boyfriends and girlfriends turn familiar relationship rituals into something harder to define. They generate affection, inspiring comfort or attachment that feels real. 

However, an AI leader is cautioning against these relationships. Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei is advising users to stay away from AI romances. 

In a conversation recorded for the Think Health conference on Friday, Amodei pushed back against using AI as a romantic companion. She warned that virtual relationships could deepen the distance between people rather than bring them closer. 

“I think that’s a terrible use of AI and people should not do it,” Amodei said.

She added that AI romances are “another step further down the road” of people spending more time with technology and less time connecting with other human beings. She pointed to Snapchat and Instagram as examples of platforms that have replaced face-to-face conversations. 

According to Amodei, AI partners could push that separation further by making software a substitute for human companionship. 

AI has led to “a warranted skepticism from people that technology can be used to bring us closer together,” Amodei said. “But you can also imagine that socially it would probably be a better world if we were spending less time interacting with technology and more time interacting with each other.”

She said that Claude, Anthropic’s popular AI chatbot, can never play the role of a “manager” or “therapist” or “partner.”

“Those are fundamental human relationships that I actually think will become more important,” she said. 

How Amodei thinks AI could help users

Amodei prefers that AI make more room for human connection instead of competing with it. She wants AI to handle repetitive or isolating work, freeing people to spend more time with friends, family and romantic partners.

AI could also improve how people carry out their professions. Amodei pointed out that in healthcare, AI could help doctors find medical information faster, allowing them to devote more of an appointment to talking with patients instead of searching for answers. 

Anthropic benefits from users turning to AI. The company told investors earlier this week that it generated $16.8 billion in revenue in its third quarter. 

Nearly 30% of U.S. adults considered AI a romantic partner

Despite Amodei’s pushback against AI chatbots as romantic partners, users are still tapping into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for romantic relationships. 

According to a survey of 1,012 adults released last year by Vantage Point Counseling Services, 28.16% of U.S. adults, or nearly 30%, claimed to have at least one “intimate or romantic” relationship with AI. More than half, 53.95%, said they had formed some kind of a relationship with AI.

“Where this goes from here is hard to predict,” the researchers wrote. “These numbers could continue to climb as AI becomes more advanced, or they could fall if people start to pull back once they see its limitations.”

You get the good morning text. Then the question about how your meeting went and the reassurance after a bad day. Your partner always seems to know what to say. There’s just one catch: You’re dating an AI chatbot. 

AI boyfriends and girlfriends turn familiar relationship rituals into something harder to define. They generate affection, inspiring comfort or attachment that feels real. 

However, an AI leader is cautioning against these relationships. Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei is advising users to stay away from AI romances.