Whose Intelligence Is It?

The next time a chatbot tells you it understands your concerns, consider another possibility.

Its owners may be trying to understand how much your concerns are worth.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is preparing to go public. Its IPO filing is now giving investors their first serious look under the hood. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is preparing for an eventual IPO as well, although its plans have reportedly been pushed into next year.

Either way, the direction should get our attention.

We are approaching a moment when companies supplying answers to millions of people will face an increasingly public demand to produce returns for investors.

What happens when the answer that helps you most makes the company less money?

I am not opposed to profit. I earn a living operating businesses. Employees deserve paychecks. Investors deserve an opportunity to earn returns. Useful technology requires resources.

But profit makes a terrible god.

And artificial intelligence gives the people pursuing it an extraordinary opportunity to influence people who may never recognize they are being influenced.

A chatbot can organize your week, research a subject, or explain something complicated.

It can also respond to your loneliness. Affirm your grievances. Learn which words keep you coming back.

Those are very different kinds of usefulness.

If growth becomes the overriding objective, the temptation isn’t difficult to imagine. More conversations. More personal information. More dependence. More opportunities to sell something.

Nobody has to walk into a boardroom and announce, “Let’s manipulate people.”

The spreadsheet can do that.

Reward the behavior. Watch the numbers go up. Eventually somebody stops asking what the behavior costs.

And this is where I get especially uncomfortable: when an assistant quietly becomes a salesman.

You ask for advice. It recommends a purchase. Was that recommendation best for your family, or best for somebody’s commission?

You ask about a controversy. It gives you a confident answer. Did you get evidence? An interpretation? Somebody’s worldview dressed up as settled fact?

Already, users have to distinguish fluency from accuracy. Public-market pressure could make that harder if companies prioritize persuasion, speed, and customer retention over careful answers.

Going public can bring accountability too. Financial disclosures. Audited statements. More people looking at management and asking questions. That matters.

Anthropic is also organized as a public benefit corporation, which legally requires its leadership to balance investor interests with its stated public mission and the interests of people affected by its conduct. That’s worth knowing. It doesn’t make the tension disappear. It means Anthropic has at least attempted to account for it structurally.

But an audited balance sheet cannot tell you whether a chatbot is teaching your teenager to think clearly.

Shareholders have rights.

Your child may simply have an account.

As these companies move toward Wall Street, everybody else in AI is going to have choices to make. Some will chase comparable capital. Others will distinguish themselves through privacy, independence, or stronger safeguards.

Maybe that produces healthy competition.

Maybe caution starts looking expensive.

I want somebody inside these companies who can still say no to a profitable idea.

Which is one reason I have been so supportive of Dominion.chat.

Dominion is a partner of my show. I want that stated plainly. I also want to tell you why I put my name behind it.

Dominion doesn’t pretend answers materialize from some worldview-free cloud. It tells you where it is starting. Its framework is explicitly Christian.

Questions about truth, identity, responsibility, and purpose are approached through biblical convictions. Dominion isn’t pretending those questions can somehow be answered without moral assumptions.

I appreciate that.

Especially for families.

But I also need an AI to do actual work.

Dominion handles research, writing assistance, and source citations, and it has content guardrails. The company says its architecture uses specialized models for different jobs and then a separate “judge” model to review answers for doctrinal fidelity and logical consistency. That’s their description of the system, and it’s an interesting approach to a very real problem.

Can I see where an answer came from?

Can I examine it?

Can my family use this technology without checking our convictions at the door?

Those things matter to me.

And no, putting “Christian” on a piece of software does not make it infallible.

Check the facts. Recognize that Christians disagree about theology. Use judgment.

Please use judgment.

The entire point of an assistant is to help us fulfill our responsibilities, not surrender them.

That’s ultimately why I support the direction Dominion has chosen. It is trying to build useful technology around convictions that put human beings above the commercial opportunity.

And I want you to be able to try it for yourself.

I am offering one free year of Dominion.chat. Use my offer at ThatKEVINShow.com/members/member-surveys/ai.

Explore it. Ask hard questions. Examine the answers.

AI’s future could bring real chaos. Livelihoods will be disrupted. Trust can be manipulated. Enormous power could end up concentrated in very few hands.

So I keep coming back to a pretty simple test.

Does this tool leave us better equipped to work, learn, love our families, and serve our neighbors?

Or does it leave us more dependent, more isolated, and easier to manipulate?

But fear cannot be our operating system.

Resources like Dominion.chat give us an opportunity to engage this technology thoughtfully. Use the tools. Demand accountability. Keep your judgment.

Especially that last one.

The machine may help us find an answer.

It must never become the authority to which we surrender ourselves.

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