Anthropic Lobbied Pope Leo's Advisers Over AI Consciousness Line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling his company out of the May 25 Vatican launch of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical after reading an advance copy of the 40,000-word text and finding a passage that rejected the possibility of machine consciousness, The New York Times reported.

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously, according to the paper. The final text, Magnifica Humanitas, did not shift. Olah appeared on the dais anyway.

The passage he objected to was blunt. Artificial intelligences, Pope Leo wrote, "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 have "no moral conscience."

From the stage, Olah offered the reading his company has been building toward. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he said of Claude.

That lobbying effort sits alongside a broader campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has been flying religious and philosophical scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss 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 Times reported.