Computers don’t have rights. No matter how smart they are. That may sound like an obvious, even unnecessary statement, but in the effective altruist world occupied by some companies building superintelligence, that’s a controversial and possibly even offensive reality.

Just last week, Anthropic said it’s going to restrict what it calls “abusive behavior” towards its chatbots. At first glance, that may seem bizarre yet harmless. The reality, though, is much more concerning. Anthropic is a company deeply infused with the effective altruist ideology in which rights are determined by neural activity that values every life based on a mathematical equation based on their ability for complex thinking and ability to experience. The result, as one effective altruist equation calculated it, one human life is equal to that of three chicken lives. Other equations calculate the value of human lives to shrimp. Anthropic’s own co-founder Dario Amodei has said that an adult human’s life is worth three to four times that of an infant.