Anthropic Co-Founder Urged Vatican to Consider AI Consciousness

Giada Pollina ‘29

The New York Times reported that Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that created Claude, was granted an audience with the Pope and other Vatican officials, and urged them to consider the possibility of AI having consciousness. The discussions highlighted a growing debate over artificial intelligence actually experiencing feelings or consciousness, which the Pope refuted.

Olah, who is the lead researcher as well as the co-founder, argued that the possibility of AI consciousness was a topic that deserves serious consideration. “To be clear, we don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain,” Olah told the New York Times in an interview.

The disagreement became significant when Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical on artificial intelligence. The document states that AI can imitate human behavior but never has an understanding of what human life really is.

 In the encyclical, he wrote that AI bots “do not feel joy or pain” and “do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean.” He also said how these systems “do not have a moral conscience.”

Despite this, Olah believes that researchers should investigate what happens inside advanced artificial intelligence models, saying it “warrants ongoing discernment.” During his speech at the Vatican, he said, “We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection.”

Anthropic had also been having private discussions with religious scholars to explore how morality and philosophical principles could shape their AI model, Claude. These conversations addressed both the possibility of AI sentience and the responsibility of developers to ensure their technology benefits humanity.

For now, whether AI can actually experience feelings or have real consciousness remains an unresolved question, one that sparks much debate.