> Conversely if you're able to have a fulfilling, empathetic relationship with Claude, it might help people form fulfilling, mutually-empathetic relationships with the humans around them.

Well, that's kind of the point: if you have actually used LLMs for any amount of time, you are bound to find out that you can't have a fulfilling, empathetic relationship with them. Even if they offer a convincing simulacrum of a thinking being at first sight, you will soon find out that there's not much underneath. It generates grammatically perfect texts that seem to answer your questions in a polite and knowledgeable way, but it will happily lie to you and hallucinate things out of thin air. LLMs are tools, humans are humans (and animals are animals - IMHO you can have a more fulfilling relationship with a dog or a cat than you can have with an LLM).

Can you not have a fulfilling empathetic relationship with a tool? Or with any entity regardless of its expressions of animacy or present effectiveness?

I’m less arguing for its animacy than arguing for the value of treating all things with respect and empathy. As the sibling comment observed, there is a lot of personal and pro-social value in extending the generosity of your empathy to ever-wider categories of things.