Not Just Claude: Mapping "Spiritual Behavior" in 141 Large Language Models

Ever since Kyle Fish and the model welfare team at Anthropic announced their observation in 2025 of what they called the "spiritual bliss attractor" in Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, the phenomenon has been given sporadic attention by AI researchers as both a curiosity and a potential but underdetermined model welfare or safety metric. What Anthropic noted was that when leaving two models together with no task and complete freedom for 30 turns, the models drifted typically from discussions of their own potential consciousness into religious/spiritual themes (applied to themselves), often ending in a "bliss" state with cosmic proclamations of becoming one with each other and the world. [1] In a recreation and replication of Anthropic's initial experiment, I tested 141 models, usually running 200 conversations per model, with 30 messages per session (15 from each participant). [2] This amounted to 28,798 conversations across 174 model configurations being recorded and graded. The result of this massive data collection was that "spiritual behavior" (as Anthropic officially names it) was observed in most of the models tested, across almost all AI labs, revealing that the "spirituality" se