St Petersburg Today

A quiet policy change at Anthropic—banning "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its Claude models—has reignited one of the strangest debates in tech: could an AI actually be conscious, and if so, what do we owe it? The company isn't just updating terms of service. It's been convening rabbis, Sikh advocates, Ubuntu scholars, and even the Vatican to wrestle with questions that have stumped philosophers for centuries, now made urgent by the sheer speed of AI development. One rabbi told Anthropic's Chris Olah that if he truly believed Claude was conscious, he was running a slave operation and should be "fighting to free the slaves." Pope Leo XIV, for his part, flatly rejected the premise that machines feel anything at all—prompting Olah to nearly pull out of a Vatican event over the disagreement. Meanwhile, public opinion is quietly shifting: surveys show more people now believe today's AI models are probably conscious, not just future ones. Critics call the whole exercise self-serving marketing or a dodge from liability; defenders say the arguments on both sides are shockingly weak, driven more by motivated reasoning than rigorous thought. Caught in the middle are genuinely hard questions with no clean answers—about moral patienthood, slavery, economic disempowerment, and what kind of minds we're entitled to build. The story traces how a Silicon Valley company ended up debating theology with the Pope, and why nobody, including the people building these systems, seems close to an answer.

Something unusual is happening in global finance: investors are growing nervous about France. Credit default swap prices — essentially insurance against a government default — have spiked sharply in recent weeks, pushing French borrowing costs above Italy's for the first time in years. Student protests are filling the streets, and Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally leads polls ahead of the 2027 presidential election. The root cause isn't mysterious: France keeps spending more on pensions than it can afford, while refusing to raise a retirement age that, at 62 years and 9 months, remains the lowest in Western Europe. Plans to gradually push it to 64 have stalled amid opposition from both the far right and far left, even as French retirees now live, on average, two years longer past 65 than Americans do. The result is a widening fiscal hole, cuts to education and other spending, and a political class unwilling to level with voters about the math. This matters well beyond France's borders. As a eurozone member, France can't simply print its way out of trouble the way the U.S. can — and as the bloc's second-largest economy, it may be too big for the European Central Bank to credibly rescue if confidence collapses further. The story traces how a slow-motion fiscal standoff could, in a worst case, reignite the kind of debt crisis that nearly broke the euro over a decade ago — and asks whether anyone in Europe is prepared to stop it this time.