Kyle Fish's role as a full-time AI welfare researcher at Anthropic is reported in Transformer News (https://www.trans...

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# Anthropic has hired an 'AI welfare' researcher

### Kyle Fish joined the company last month to explore whether we might have moral obligations to AI systems

[Shakeel Hashim](https://substack.com/@shakeelhashim)

Oct 31, 2024

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[![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vNA1!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa59f8f67-0f0d-4b7f-8f3a-e34e3b77a867_2880x1620.webp)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vNA1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa59f8f67-0f0d-4b7f-8f3a-e34e3b77a867_2880x1620.webp) _Image: [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet)_

Anthropic has hired its first full-time employee focused on the welfare of artificial intelligence systems, Transformer has learned. It’s the clearest sign yet that AI companies are beginning to grapple with questions about whether future AI systems might deserve moral consideration — and whether that means we might have obligations to care about their welfare.

Kyle Fish, who joined the company's alignment science team in mid-September, told Transformer that he is tasked with investigating “model welfare” and what companies should do about it. The role involves exploring heady philosophical and technical questions, including which capabilities are required for something to be worthy of moral consideration, how we might recognise such capabilities in AIs, and what practical steps companies might take to protect AI systems’ interests — if they turn out to have any.

News of the hire comes as researchers — including Fish — publish a [major new report](https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-welfar

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