Can AI be moral without being sentient?

Pope Leo XIV and one of the world’s leading AI companies recently found themselves on opposite sides of a thorny question: Can a chatbot have a conscience? A New York Times investigation published late last month revealed that Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah proposed withdrawing from a Vatican event to launch Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical after reading an advance copy, which rejected the possibility of sentient AI. Paragraph 99 of Magnifica Humanitas states bluntly that AI models “do not underg