Initial public offerings are not usually occurrences that stoke religious debate, but most companies that go public are also not tinkering with ideas about the nature of consciousness itself.
Maybe that is why Anthropic’s S-1 prospectus invited comparisons to a religious text. Where SpaceX’s IPO filing was a sci-fi manifesto, the Claude maker’s document stirred a sense of religious fervor in some who parsed its 300 pages.
Robert Netzly, the CEO of faith-based investment firm Inspire Investing, is not among those who felt that way.
“Claude is not Jesus” Netzly told Business Insider. “It is not the savior of the universe.”
Netzly’s firm conducts a “moral audit” of every potential investment, a process that consists of screening companies to ensure that they align with biblically responsible investing standards. SpaceX stock didn’t meet this criteria, largely due to xAI’s lack of guardrails around graphic content creation.
When it comes to Anthropic, though, Netzly says Inspire feels better about it, at least for now.
Inspire Investing
“The jury’s still out whether we would encourage people to invest in Anthropic’s IPO, but at least in that particular category, they have restrictions and safeguards around pornographic content and keeping that off of their software,” he told Business Insider. “That’s a big deal for us, and it’s those sort of things that we’re looking at when we make investment decisions.”
When Anthropic published its S-1 filing in October, many investors focused on the numbers it revealed. But for some, the unexpected biblical parallels stood out more, such as wanting to “bring forth an age of miracles” and referring, rather apocalyptically, to “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” posed by the technology it is creating.
Netzly said he finds this ironic, and he doesn’t approve of the framing employed by Anthropic. That said, he also sees a potential motive behind it that some investors may have missed.
Read More: What a Faith-Based Investor Is Thinking About the Coming Anthropic IPO
