Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic vs. the Pope

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Liz Wolfe | 10.2.2026 9:30 AM

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(Adani Samat/Midjourney)

Currying favor: Over the last several months, it appears that Anthropic higher-ups have been meeting with religious leaders from different faith traditions—Catholics and Ubuntu practitioners and Mormons and Jews (no, this isn't a setup for a joke)—to explore questions of how to do moral formation for Claude and whether Claude is conscious or capable of suffering. Or, looked at more cynically, they're not exploring the idea, but trying to convince.

One rabbi, per The New York Times' reporting on the meetings, believed that Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah and his colleagues "believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person—that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect." This observation was echoed by others who met with Olah:

The religious scholars had come to hear about technology's next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity's future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?

Olah's discussions with prominent religious figures were apparently about both "the possibility of A.I. consciousness" and learning how Anthropic "might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible" to make the models safer, especially once they escape human control.

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"We don't know if A.I. models are conscious," Olah told the Times. "I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is."

Olah doesn't actually seem genuinely uncertain, though, reading the article. He seems to believe that AI models are sentient beings in need of moral formation. The company released an 84-page document (about "the kind of........

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