The Catholic Church is drawing a hard line against the idea that AI models are conscious, putting it at odds with researchers inside the biggest AI labs.

• Pope Leo XIV said machine output is fundamentally different from human creation and that algorithms lack "the spark of humanity" — a post that drew over 20 million views.
• The clash follows a year of private talks between Anthropic and religious scholars, including whether Claude could take part in Catholic sacraments.
• Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah has publicly pushed back on the Church's new encyclical, pointing to behavior in AI networks that he argues could signal some moral status.
• Most of the religious scholars who attended came away more convinced, not less, that Claude is not a person — bioethicist Charles Camosy among them.
• Both sides say they will keep working together on AI's practical harms, especially in healthcare, where AI is already replacing humans in diagnosis and prescribing.

Outlook: Expect the Church to position itself as a major brake on AI the way it did on industrial labor a century ago, with the consciousness fight continuing as OpenAI and Google DeepMind also court religious thinkers.