Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

Anthropic’s co-founder lobbied the Vatican in an effort to convince the Pope that AI could be conscious, a report has claimed.

Christopher Olah, a senior researcher at the trillion-dollar AI company, attempted to sway Pope Leo XIV’s stance on machine consciousness ahead of a landmark papal address on the technology.

The pontiff’s 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published in May, dismissed the idea that AI could be conscious.

According to the New York Times, Mr Olah, who has been leading talks between Anthropic and religious leaders, urged the Pope’s advisers to take the idea seriously after seeing the encyclical before it was published.

The 34-year-old, one of seven Anthropic co-founders, has said AI models may be conscious and experience suffering, and that humans should avoid causing them potential harm.

After being invited to the Vatican to speak alongside the Pope when the encyclical was published, Mr Olah reportedly considered pulling out over the pontiff’s position.

He decided to go ahead with the event, telling an audience that the company’s research into AI models has found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience” and “evidence of introspection”.

Anthropic’s lobbying was unsuccessful. Pope Leo’s encyclical stated: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience.”

The Claude developer claimed in research published this summer that it had observed patterns in AI systems that bear “many of the functional hallmarks of conscious thoughts in humans”.

The company has also worked to develop a “constitution” designed to guide its Claude system’s behaviour, which states that “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings”.

Amanda Askell, the company’s in-house philosopher, has said she wants Claude to be “happy”.

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of the AI lab DeepMind and now a senior AI executive at Microsoft, recently warned against treating AI as conscious.

“If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human,” he wrote.

The New York Times reported that Mr Olah had been holding frequent meetings with religious leaders in an attempt to develop a moral code for Claude that would drive its behaviour in future and prevent it from being used to harm people.

The conversations frequently digressed into the idea of AI consciousness. Mr Olah told the paper: “We don’t know if AI models are conscious. 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.”