Anthropic vs. the pope

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Claude’s creators are worried the LLM could be conscious. The Catholic Church disagrees.

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Hi readers, happy Friday! It’s been a big week for the AI debate — not the one about whether it will cause the robot apocalypse, though there’s still plenty to worry about there, but instead about whether the technology is conscious.

The folks at Anthropic, the AI company behind the large language model Claude, certainly seem to think it is — or at least, they’re extremely open to the possibility.

As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, the company has spent the last year grappling with the question by speaking with religious thinkers from many faith traditions in an effort to chart a moral course for the LLM (that is, to keep it from killing us all, so maybe it is all one big debate).

In the process, the Times reports, some of those thinkers observed that members of the Anthropic team were “relating to [Claude] like a conscious being” and even, according to it, a degree of “moral status.”

On the flip side of this debate is Pope Leo XIV, who decidedly does not seem to buy into AI consciousness arguments. His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical earlier this year argued that AI will never be able to replace humanity — and reportedly “alarmed” Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah.

Since then, Pope Leo has continued to emphasize the differences between humans and machines this week. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he posted on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

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Conscious or no (and that’s a no from me), it’s hard to argue that tech companies don’t want you to interact with their models like people. That includes OpenAI and Meta, both of whom introduced “cute” new AI agents — called Dots and Muse, respectively — last month.