Executive from AI startup Anthropic gathered a group of religious thinkers for dinner at an upscale restaurant in April, part of an ongoing effort by the company to convince theologians, philosophers and scholars that AI is a conscious being, just like humans are.
The New York Times reports that for months, Anthropic has quietly hosted dozens of religious scholars from around the world in private meetings, asking them to sign aon-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before discussing the moral and spiritual dimensions of the AI the company is building. The outreach included wisdom circle sessions that began in March as two-day seminars, two larger spring gatherings that included Christian participants, and one multifaith session. Anthropic said the NDAs tied to these meetings were lifted over the summer.
Christopher Olah, 34, one of Anthropic’s seven co-founders, leads the effort. He also heads the team that studies why the company’s AI models, including Claude, behave the way they do. Olah grew up in Toronto in the evangelical culture of the 1990s and has since left Christianity. Before Anthropic he worked at Google and OpenAI, where he developed methods for studying artificial neural networks. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said the company had made Olah’s research approach, particularly around language, central to its work. Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, is the company’s president.
Olah began reaching out to religious thinkers last fall, after being introduced to Charles Camosy, a bioethics professor at The Catholic University of America, through the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Camosy and Olah exchanged extensive emails. Camosy said he was initially skeptical that Claude could be conscious, and he later described himself as a “firm ‘no’” on the question of A.I. consciousness. When Olah first contacted him, Anthropic was valued at roughly $183 billion. The company could now be valued at $2 trillion.
According to the Times, religious leaders thought they were going to learn about the potential future applications of AI, but instead got pressed to acknowledge that AI is a conscious being:
“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness.
It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.
The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?
Participants were sent a handwritten thank-you card, a coffee mug and an orange bound copy of Claude’s constitution. That constitution, known internally as the “Soul Doc,” is an 84-page document describing “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.” It was released in January, written primarily by Amanda Askell, 38, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher.
Olah’s engagement with religious institutions culminated in May at the Vatican, where Pope Leo XIV, who holds a degree in mathematics, released his first major papal encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”). Cardinal Michael Czerny, who led the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, had initially invited Dario Amodei to speak at the encyclical’s launch. Amodei declined, and Olah accepted in his place. Vatican officials had spent March debating how to present the document.
Olah and other speakers received a full advance copy of the encyclical days before arriving at the Vatican in May. After reading its strong stance against AI consciousness, Olah proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event altogether. He ultimately appeared alongside the pope at the presentation on May 25 and afterward took questions from journalists in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall reveals in his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI that the worship of artificial intelligence as a literal deity is not science fiction. It is already happening, complete with IRS-registered churches, robot priests, and AI confessionals:
What’s really at stake, Hall argues, is the oldest argument in Western civilization: secular humanism’s belief that mankind is innately good and perfectible through engineering, versus the Judeo-Christian belief in fallen human nature that requires divine redemption, not technological upgrades. “Artificial intelligence is defective in the same way that a natural man is defective,” Hall quotes the pastor and theologian John Piper as saying. “It can rise no higher than the natural, fallen, unregenerate heart of man.” The Reverend Billy Graham agreed: “The real problem, you see, isn’t with computers or the code someone devises to control them. Our real problem is within us—within our own hearts and minds. . . . This is why our greatest need is to have our hearts changed—and that is something only God can do.”
The transhumanist movement, which Hall explores at length in CODE RED , takes the logic further still. In a famed 2004 issue of Foreign Policy on the theme of “the world’s most dangerous ideas,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the chief menace, warning that its incremental advance makes it appear “downright reasonable” until we start nibbling at “biotechnology’s tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.” Former Trump campaign strategist Stephen K. Bannon called it an “immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”
Read more at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.