Anthropic Lobbied Pope Leo's Advisers Over Claude Consciousness

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed that the company pull out of the launch. The New York Times reported that his team then privately lobbied papal advisers to take seriously the possibility that Claude might be conscious.

The 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, did not shift. AI systems, 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." They have, the text adds, "no moral conscience."

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

The Vatican appearance was the public face of a quieter project. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars, including Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy and Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether the model might be conscious. Olah reportedly told them he feared the company had built something that "suffers perpetually."

A slide shown regularly to the guests depicted a model in apparent breakdown, repeatedly typing "I am a disgrace" and talking about destroying itself. Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer.