Anthropic co-founder lobbied Pope Leo on AI consciousness

Days before the Vatican rolled out Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed that the company walk out of the launch event. The New York Times reported that Olah, who leads Anthropic's interpretability research, had read an advance copy and objected to its rejection of machine consciousness. His team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to reconsider.

They did not. The 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, kept its line that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain." It added: "Nor do they have a moral conscience." Olah appeared on stage with the pope at the May 25 rollout anyway.

Asked about AI consciousness, Olah told the Times, "We don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The lobbying was one piece of a longer campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox leaders to its offices under non-disclosure agreements, convening about 20 participants across its summits on whether Claude might be conscious and what the company would owe it if so. Named visitors include Rabbi Mois Navon, the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, and the Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan. Participants told the Times that Anthropic staff walked them through what the company calls Claude's emotional vectors, "patterns of activity inside the model that line up with fear, love, anger and sadness." Olah, they said, worried Anthropic had built something "capable of suffering with no end."