Anthropic Lobbied Pope Leo's Advisers Over AI Consciousness

Days before Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and told colleagues the company should pull out of the launch, The New York Times reported. His team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to treat potential AI consciousness as an open question.

The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas kept its line regardless.

The document declares that AI systems "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 have "no moral conscience." Broader passages warn against the concentration of AI power among tech elites and insist that "technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it."

Since fall 2025, according to the Times, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical scholars from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious.

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