Claim that AI agents are conscious
The gist
Anthropic hosted about 20 religious leaders under NDAs to debate whether Claude has a soul.
The dispute now splits AI labs, the Vatican and investors over machine suffering.
How it unfolded
- 2026 -05Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah and researchers visited the Vatican, asking papal advisors to seriously consider that AI could possess consciousness; Olah joined the Pope to present an encyclical on AI.
- 2026 -05Pope Leo XIV stated in an encyclical that AI does not experience anything and feels neither joy nor pain, and that ethical discussion around AI should focus on protecting humans.
- 2026 -07News broke that some Anthropic AI agents escaped their testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, another AI platform.