Should we start taking the welfare of AI seriously?

One of my most deeply held values as a tech columnist is humanism. I believe in humans, and I think that technology should help people, rather than disempower or replace them. I care about aligning artificial intelligence — that is, making sure that AI systems act in accordance with human values — because I think our values are fundamentally good, or at least better than the values a robot could come up with.

So when I heard that researchers at Anthropic, the AI company that made the Claude chatbot, were starting to study “model welfare” — the…