Anthropic co-founder nearly skipped Pope's AI encyclical launch

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed that the company pull out of the launch, The New York Times reported. The sticking point sat in paragraph 99 of the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas, a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious.

On so-called artificial intelligences, Pope Leo wrote that they "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean," and that they "do not have a moral conscience."

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The line stayed in. Olah appeared on the dais anyway, and from the stage described Claude in different terms: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

The reporting places the Vatican episode inside a longer, quieter campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has brought religious and philosophical scholars to its offices, many under nondisclosure agreements, to debate whether Claude has moral standing. Attendees named by the Times include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. At one San Francisco dinner at an upscale restaurant, guests left with thank-you notes, coffee mugs and orange-bound copies of Claude's 84-page constitution.

Olah has pitched the stakes bluntly. "Those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems," he said.