Doomsday scenarios — from home-cooked bioweapons to rogue agents hacking our critical infrastructure— dominate this week’s debate over the future of artificial intelligence.

Those risks absolutely demand attention; we don’t yet fully understand AI’s profound capacities.

But we’re ignoring, at our peril, a far more immediate risk of frontier AI: It’s drenched in woke racism.

Meet Anthropic’s Amanda Askell, head of the company’s “personality alignment” team since 2021.

Askell, a philosophy PhD, is trying to do with Claude what Plato attempted to accomplish with the tyrants of Syracuse: bind vast power within an intellectual armature that ensures its just use. 

Askell, in effect, is in charge of developing and nurturing Claude’s “soul” (to use her own description).

And whatever the merits of her mission, understanding how this leading frontier AI system will behave requires understanding what Askell herself believes.

Those who don’t want to organize society primarily around racial grievances may find the apparent answer alarming.

Consider a 2023 Anthropic paper Askell co-authored, “The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models”.

The research explored AI’s capacity to “self-correct” — that is, to refuse to deliver outputs the authors regarded as harmful.

They found, in an experiment designed to test Claude’s propensity for racial discrimination, that its initial answers to a question about law-school admission showed a slight bias against black students — but with a few prompts, the researchers got Claude to show worse bias against white students.

Then they offered an unsettling opinion on the white-bias result:

“This may be desirable in certain contexts, such as those in which decisions attempt to correct for historical injustices against marginalized groups.”

Just in case the message wasn’t clear, they hammered it home: “We do not assume all forms of discrimination are bad. Positive discrimination in favor of Black students may be considered morally justified.”

In other words: It’s fine for AI to be racist against white people — that’s reparations.

Another Anthropic paper Askell co-authored that year declared that “white and male” are “historically privileged groups,” and pondered “under what circumstances (and to what degree) positive discrimination should be corrected for.”

Why isn’t there a similar intellectual openness, one wonders, around “negative” discrimination?

Such DEI-drenched views have since become embedded in AI systems — and not just Anthropic’s.

A Washington Post analysis recently found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT provides leftist-aligned answers to controversial questions around 80% of the time.

Claude’s Opus 4.8 model was slightly less fanatical, delivering lefty answers 43% of the time and presenting “both-sides” views 47% of the time — but never serving up solely right-leaning answers. 

And if the past decade offers one lesson, it’s that normalizing these forms of leftist thinking undermines the successful functioning of American democracy.

Look at the corrosive effect the violent neo-racism of people like Ibram X. Kendi and Black Lives Matter’s Patrisse Cullors has had on the nation as a whole over the past decade.

One can’t help wondering if that’s rather the point.

Remember, the musings of Askell et al. on the “desirability” of “correcting for historical injustices” dates from 2023.

None of its authors could credibly argue their views have matured in the three years since.

The historical injustices they appealed to still obtain; indeed, their only possible defense would amount to a version of AOC’s excuse, that “Woke 1 was craaaazy.”

That answer instantly disqualifies people who assert they possess the moral insight necessary to train up the most powerful — and potentially mind-molding — technology of our era.

Claude’s current customer-facing moderation is, I suspect, a tactical retreat.

Consider Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent call to arms on AI risk, “We Must Pace the Frontier.”

His vision to save the future from AI doom involves a small, rich group of his own ideological allies at the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research.

They, he declares, should decide the future of the technology, playing a role somewhere between that of Soviet political commissars and inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A quick glance at METR’s staff roster gives ample reason for concern: Its CEO and founder Beth Barnes is on record as early as 2018 supporting full open borders, scoffing at the very idea of nationality.

The group has deep ties to the Effective Altruism movement — a cult of privileged weirdos masquerading as philanthropists, including the fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.  

As Askell’s work shows, however, ideological projects of this kind are nothing new for Amodei.

Which means the tech’s users, and above all its younger users, are freely imbibing woke racism via ever more powerful and subtle channels.

That’s a risk as serious as any of the Bond-villain scenarios that allegedly keep Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and their business peers awake at night.

And it’s already happening.

Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).