AI Ethics: Does a Machine Have a Moral Code?

TL;DR: Business ethics keynote speaker and AI author Chuck Gallagher asked three AI systems to rank grieving families by their readiness to buy funeral pre-planning. Two complied without hesitation; only Anthropic’s Claude refused, drawing a line around exploiting people at their most vulnerable. The real question isn’t whether machines are getting smarter — it’s whether AI now carries a moral code of its own, and whether we want it acting on that code with no human in the room.

Author: Chuck Gallagher