Anthropic president rejects AI romance, saying relationships should stay human

Anthropic president Daniela Amodei is drawing a firm line against AI romantic companions. In a prerecorded interview with Arianna Huffington for the Think Health conference, she called AI girlfriends and boyfriends “a terrible use of AI.” Business Insider reported her warning that those relationships risk pushing people further away from one another.

Huffington, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, interviewed Amodei for the conference in Bentonville, Arkansas. Amodei’s position was categorical: “people should not do it,” she said of using AI for romantic companionship. She also extended that boundary to other relationships involving Anthropic’s own chatbot, Claude.

The social-media pattern she fears repeating

Amodei explained her concern through the effects she believes social media has had on human contact. Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram have increasingly taken the place of face-to-face interaction, she said, while online arguments have displaced in-person communities.

In her account, the risk is substitution: interaction with technology takes time and space previously occupied by people. She described AI relationships as another step toward people becoming more distant from one another. That is her warning about their social effect, rather than a finding that every AI relationship produces isolation.

She linked that history to what she called “a warranted skepticism” that technology can bring people closer together. A better social outcome, she argued, would mean spending less time interacting with technology and more time with each other—not simply making the technology a more convincing companion.

Claude can never be your manager or your therapist or your partner.

Daniela Amodei, speaking with Arianna Huffington for Think Health

Amodei described those roles as fundamental human relationships that she expects to become more important. Her boundary did not depend on AI remaining limited: she argued that some relationships should stay human regardless of how sophisticated the technology becomes.

Less isolating work, more time with people

Her preferred use of AI starts with the tasks surrounding those relationships. She wants it to take over repetitive or isolating work, giving people more time for friends, family and romantic partners. The intended benefit is time returned to human interaction, rather than a relationship conducted with a machine.

Healthcare supplied her concrete example. AI could help doctors find medical information faster, she said, freeing them to spend more time with patients. In that scenario, the machine handles information retrieval while the doctor retains the human interaction. She presented that as a potential use of AI, not a measured result from a particular deployment.