A New York Times feature published on September 29, 2026 reports that Anthropic has spent months consulting religious and philosophical thinkers about how Claude should behave and whether it might have moral status. The piece, by Elizabeth Dias and reported from San Francisco, the Vatican and Washington, describes sessions convened by Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah with roughly 20 participants. Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah has spent the past year engaging privately with Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, and other religious and philosophical thinkers to address two profound questions: how to instill moral values in increasingly advanced AI systems, and whether models like Claude could possess consciousness or deserve moral consideration. The debate becomes particularly striking when contrasted with the Vatican’s perspective. Pope Leo XIV takes a fundamentally different position, emphasizing that AI cannot experience joy, suffering, or the embodied reality of human existence. From this viewpoint, focusing too heavily on machine consciousness risks distracting attention from AI’s real ethical consequences for humanity. According to the article, this disagreement deeply troubled Olah, who reportedly considered withdrawing from a Vatican event over the pope’s dismissal of AI consciousness, although he ultimately decided to attend. submitted by /u/m3nt3_
Originally posted by u/m3nt3_ on r/ArtificialInteligence
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