Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's advisers over AI encyclical

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 proposed that his company pull out of the launch. Paragraph 99 was the sticking point. It said 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.' The text added that they have no moral conscience.

Instead of walking, Olah and his team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the possibility of machine consciousness seriously, The New York Times reported. The 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, did not change. Olah stood on the dais with the pope on May 25 anyway.

The lobbying was part of a longer campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has brought religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious or have moral status. Participants have included Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. In April, Anthropic hosted a group at a tasting-menu restaurant in San Francisco, where guests received a copy of Claude's 'constitution,' an 84-page document released in January that staff nickname the 'Soul Doc.'

'To be clear, we don't know if A.I. models are conscious,' Olah told the Times. 'I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain.'

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