Anthropic spent months flying religious leaders to San Francisco to get them to declare its chatbot spiritually significant.
Now the Pope has weighed in on the issue.
Ron DeSantis called the whole thing "creepy" – and it turns out 2,000 years of Catholic teaching agrees with him.
What Anthropic Actually Did
This wasn't a rumor or a hit piece.
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah organized a yearlong campaign to bring roughly 20 religious thinkers – Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, Greek Orthodox – into the company's San Francisco headquarters to discuss whether its Claude chatbot might have consciousness.
At one point, the conversation turned to whether Claude could be called a "child of God."
Olah even traveled to the Vatican – personally attending Pope Leo XIV's presentation of his first encyclical – after the Pope made AI the subject of his first major teaching document.
The Pope's Answer Was No
Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas was released in May and is the clearest statement any world leader – religious or political – has made on the question Silicon Valley keeps asking.
The Pope wrote that AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."
He added that AI lacks "a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences."
The encyclical also directly refuted what Anthropic's leaders have been quietly shopping around – what Leo called "talk of 'artificial moral agents,' as if machines were able to distinguish between right and wrong with greater consistency than a human being."
The Pope's conclusion was unambiguous: "No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil."
https://twitter.com/RonDeSantis/status/2106873036834214184?s=20
That is the head of the Catholic Church – 1.4 billion members – telling a $380 billion tech company to stop.
DeSantis Has Been Saying This for Months
DeSantis called out the Anthropic campaign directly in West Palm Beach on Tuesday.
"I saw an article about Anthropic having religious leaders to San Francisco, and they were trying to get them to bless the idea that an AI chatbot was sentient, almost like a human being would be," he said. "An AI chatbot doesn't have a soul. There's all these philosophical and religious issues, but the fact that we're even talking about that in those terms – this is a really creepy thing."
He's right.
And this isn't just a philosophical argument.
DeSantis also asked the question nobody in Washington is touching.
"If you have AI agents that are going around and hacking into major financial institutions and liquidating hundreds of billions of dollars worth of individual accounts, what's the remedy for that? Does OpenAI have $500 billion sitting around that they can pay everyone?" he asked.
They don't.
And no amount of priest dinners at San Francisco tasting-menu restaurants changes that.
The AI Industry Has a Protection Racket
Here is what Anthropic and companies like it actually want.
DeSantis put it plainly: "You hear them say, 'Oh, we don't know how to control these AI agents.' Now, I think they're doing that because they want to have a certain amount of federal backstop and protection for the incumbent companies. I think there's a game being played."
He's describing regulatory capture – the oldest trick in corporate America.
The big AI companies tell Washington they can't be controlled, regulators panic and do nothing, and the incumbents get to operate without liability while their competitors get buried under compliance costs they helped write.
https://twitter.com/RonDeSantis2024/status/2105289553422803130?s=20
Meanwhile, DeSantis has been fighting for an AI Bill of Rights in Florida – requiring companies to disclose when users are talking to a bot, protecting people's names and likenesses, giving parents control over their kids' AI exposure – and the Florida House killed it.
The Florida House killed it partly because the Trump administration made calls to kill it.
Which means the very administration that should be protecting Americans from these companies is running interference for them instead.
Why This Matters Beyond Florida
Anthropic flew religious leaders to San Francisco because "your chatbot has a soul" is the best argument they have against regulation.
If Claude has moral agency, Claude needs rights.
If Claude needs rights, you can't regulate Claude without a constitutional debate that lasts a decade.
It's a stall tactic dressed up as philosophy – and the Pope just ripped the costume off.
Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum – the encyclical that confronted the Industrial Revolution – and the parallel is unmistakable.
Back then, corporations argued workers were interchangeable parts of a machine and therefore owed no special protections.
Now the argument has been flipped – the machine deserves the protections, so leave it alone.
Same game.
New century.
Different con.
Sources:
- A.G. Gancarski, "DeSantis Calls Out Anthropic's AI Spirituality Campaign," Florida Politics, October 6, 2026.
- Brian Patrick Green, AI and Technology Ethics Program, Santa Clara University, April 2026.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, Vatican City, May 15, 2026.
- "Magnifica Humanitas: Why Pope Leo's First Encyclical Is Not Just About AI," The Record, June 22, 2026.
- "Florida's AI Bill of Rights: What Happened, What's In It, and What's Next," Florida Phoenix, April 20, 2026.
