There’s no AI company in the world more obsessed with the idea that their models may be conscious than Anthropic.
According to new reporting from the New York Times, the company has for months been wining and dining religious scholars across the world in secret, NDA-secured meetings to convince them that AI models think and feel, too.
Anthropic even reportedly went after the most iconic of all religious leaders: the Pope.
Christopher Olah, a cofounder and senior researcher at the Claude chatbot maker, aggressively lobbied the Vatican after learning Pope Leo XIV’s official position on AI, per the reporting. His attempts, though, weren’t successful.
In May, the Pope published his first papal treatise, or encyclical. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” one of its chief concerns was upholding the sanctity of human life in an age of AI. The Pope didn’t mince words on the topic of AI consciousness.
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” the Pope wrote in the religious document.
Though AI models may “imitate language” and “simulate empathy and understanding,” he added, “they do not understand what they produce.”
Before the Pope published the “Magnica Humanitas,” Vatican officials decided to invite a top AI company to speak alongside Leo, and chose Anthropic because it seemed to be prioritizing ethics, per the NYT. Olah accepted the invitation after CEO Dario Amodei declined to make the appearance.
Before he flew out, Olah received a copy of the encyclical the Pope was about to publish — and what he saw was a disaster in the making. One of the most influential people in the world full stop, and almost certainly its most visible faith leader, was completely dismissing even the possibility of AI consciousness. So indignant was Olah that he reportedly threatened to pull out of the event, though in the end he decided to show up.
According to the NYT, once the Anthropic delegation arrived at the Vatican, Olah and his team lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously. Anthropic declined to discuss the details of the conversations when the NYT reached for comment.
His efforts at spreading the AI gospel didn’t end there. When it was his turn to speak during the event, Olah teased that Anthropic researchers were finding “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience” and “evidence of introspection.”
The Pope’s latest communiqué on AI likely caused Olah to blow a gasket. On Friday, he decried machine-generated art, saying that “algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
“There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” Leo XIV wrote on social media.
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