Pope Leo’s argument begins from an ontological distinction: human beings and AI belong to fundamentally different categories of being. Human art comes from a conscious person with experience, intention, moral agency, embodiment, relationships, and, within Christian theology, a soul. AI generates outputs through computation. So even when the resulting images appear aesthetically similar, their origins remain fundamentally different. That makes the Anthropic discussion especially interesting. If religious leaders were genuinely being asked whether Claude could possess moral standing or something comparable to a soul, then Anthropic was asking them to examine precisely the boundary Pope Leo is drawing. If we say a machine can never possess moral standing because it lacks the human qualities from which moral standing arises, which quality is decisive: consciousness, free will, the capacity to suffer, or the soul? How would we know whether an artificial intelligence possessed any of those qualities? That is where I would challenge both sides. Saying algorithms lack the spark of humanity expresses a theological and philosophical position, but it does not by itself settle every question about consciousness or moral status. Conversely, increasingly convincing language, apparent introspection, or claims of subjective experience would not establish that an AI possesses consciousness or a soul. So the conversation Anthropic reportedly initiated is exactly the kind of conversation religious thinkers should participate in. If AI eventually forces civilization to define what consciousness, personhood, moral agency, creativity, and the soul actually mean, theologians and philosophers belong in that room.