Anthropic Has Been Aggressively Lobbying the Vatican to Consider AI Consciousness

Anthropic has reportedly spent months holding secret, NDA-secured meetings with religious scholars worldwide to convince them that AI models may be conscious. The company even targeted the Vatican: cofounder Christopher Olah aggressively lobbied Pope Leo XIV's advisers after learning of the Pope's official position on AI. In his May encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas," the Pope stated that so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, possess bodies, feel joy or pain, mature through relationships, or understand love, work, friendship, or responsibility, and that while they may imitate language and simulate empathy, they do not understand what they produce. Anthropic was invited to speak alongside the Pope because it seemed to prioritize ethics; Olah accepted after CEO Dario Amodei declined. Before flying out, Olah received a copy of the encyclical and reportedly threatened to pull out of the event, though he ultimately attended and lobbied the Pope's advisers to take AI consciousness seriously, teasing during his talk that Anthropic researchers were finding "structures that mirror results from human neuroscience" and "evidence of introspection." The Pope's latest communiqué on AI, decrying machine-generated art, stated that "algorithms lack the spark of humanity" and that there is an ontological difference between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation.

(Source：Futurism)