The Question Neither May Close On Anthropic, the Vatican, and the lobbying of certainty
The Question Neither May Close On Anthropic, the Vatican, and the lobbying of certainty According to reporting by Elizabeth Dias in the *New York Times* (September 29, 2026), Anthropic has spent the better part of a year flying religious scholars to its offices — under nondisclosure agreements — to discuss whether its Claude models might be conscious. Catholic bioethicists, rabbis, philosophers, a Sikh human-rights advocate. They were shown internal demonstrations the company called "emotional vectors," including a model describing itself negatively and discussing self-destruction. Cofounder Christopher Olah told the group he feared he had created something that "suffered perpetually." Then came the Vatican. Days before Pope Leo XIV unveiled his first encyclical, *Magnifica Humanitas*, at the Vatican on May 25, Olah read an advance copy — and proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event. The 40,000-word text rejected the possibility of machine consciousness outright:...