Anthropic Lobbied Pope Leo's Advisers Over AI Consciousness

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, did not like one passage, and proposed pulling his company out of the Vatican rollout on May 25. The sticking point was a line rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious. According to The New York Times, Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously.

They did not succeed. The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas kept its line. "So-called 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," Pope Leo wrote. "Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah appeared on the dais with the pope anyway when the encyclical was presented.

Behind the Vatican episode is a longer, quieter project. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to talk about whether Claude might be conscious. Among them: 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.

Olah's own position is more hedged than the lobbying suggests. "To be clear, we don't know if A.I. models are conscious," he told the paper. "I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."