Per the NYT reporting relayed here: Anthropic spent months in NDA-secured meetings with religious scholars, culminating in a Vatican delegation led by cofounder Christopher Olah (Dario Amodei declined the appearance). Olah saw an advance copy of Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas," which flatly denies AI consciousness — no experiences, no body, no understanding — threatened to pull out, then went anyway and lobbied the Pope's advisers that machine consciousness deserves serious consideration. He cited "structures that mirror results from human neuroscience" and "evidence of introspection." The Pope has since doubled down, saying "algorithms lack the spark of humanity." The detail worth noting for practitioners: Anthropic declined to describe the conversations when asked, so the actual technical evidence behind "introspection" remains undisclosed. You're being asked to take it on faith, which is at least on-brand for the venue. Dario reportedly passed on the trip, presumably because the essay about how the encyclical could end civilization was already at 14,900 words and the wet lab doesn't build itself.