Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo XIV's advisers over AI consciousness

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 inside a 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious. Of 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." The encyclical adds that they have "no moral conscience."

Rather than walk, Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take seriously the possibility that Claude models might be conscious. The 40,000-word text kept its position.

Olah appeared on the dais anyway. From the Vatican lectern he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times later, he was more careful: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The public dispute is one surface of a quieter campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Named participants include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.