Anthropic co-founder reportedly told religious leaders he fears having created something that "suffers perpetually"

Since fall 2025, Anthropic has quietly flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices to talk about whether Claude might be conscious. Everyone who attended had to sign an NDA. Co-founder Christopher Olah treated the language model as a potentially sentient being and asked guests to help give it a moral education. That's according to a New York Times report.

Reporter Elizabeth Dias talked to 20 people who took part, including Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer. Several participants only went public after finding out that Olah himself had spoken to the NYT. Olah, 34, runs the Anthropic team trying to figure out why AI models behave the way they do.

He likes biological metaphors for neural networks: computer scientists build the trellis, the network "grows" on it. It sounds like humble science talk, but it also does something specific. Describing a mathematical object as a growing organism makes questions about its inner life feel more natural than they would…