Library · Faith & AI Gift link · free NYT login
Religious scholars met with Anthropic. What they heard stunned them.
A long feature on how Anthropic, led on this front by co-founder Christopher Olah, quietly convened religious thinkers from many traditions to help shape Claude's character, and on how the company's openness to the idea that its models might be conscious, with moral standing of their own, unsettled many of them. The piece follows that effort into the Vatican, where it ran into Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which treats machine consciousness as a non-starter.
Read the originalThe New York Times: Religious scholars met with Anthropic. What they heard stunned them.. This page is our summary, not the article. Gift link: free to read without a subscription (needs a free account login).
Why it matters
- It puts a frontier AI lab's working theory of the model (something that may deserve moral consideration) side by side with the Church's account of the human person as the moral center, and the two do not fit together.
- It shows religious traditions being consulted as sources of moral formation for AI systems, not only as critics from the outside.
- It adds a concrete episode to the Pope Leo XIV AI tracker: an Anthropic leader on the Vatican stage for the encyclical's launch, urging continued discernment about what goes on inside these models.
They're relating to it like a conscious being.
Rabbi Mois Navon, as quoted in the article