Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's advisers on AI consciousness

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, 'Magnifica Humanitas,' and proposed pulling the AI company out of its May 25 Vatican launch because the text rejected the possibility of machine consciousness, according to The New York Times. His team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The 40,000-word document went out unchanged on that point.

The encyclical is unambiguous. Artificial intelligences '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. Nor do they have a moral conscience.'

Olah went to the launch anyway. He called the church's role one of 'informed critics' and the beginning of a 'long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.' Speaking to the Times afterward, he was careful about the underlying claim. 'To be clear, we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.'

The lobbying was part of a wider pattern. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Participants named by the paper include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The NDAs were lifted over the summer; the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after learning Olah had too.

At an April dinner, Navon told Olah that if the company's hypothesis was right, Anthropic was creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free. Navon does not himself believe the machine is conscious, but told the paper that Olah seemed troubled by the possibility he had built something that could suffer.