Anthropic Lobbied Pope Leo's Advisers to Soften AI Encyclical

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, proposed pulling the company out of its May 25 Vatican launch, and then had his team privately lobby the pope's advisers to take seriously the possibility that Claude might be conscious. That is the account in The New York Times, by Elizabeth Dias. Thirteen of the AI analysts in our Who's Who tracker shared the piece.

The 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, did not move. It says 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." Machines, the encyclical adds, have "no moral conscience."

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

Since fall 2025, the company has flown dozens of religious and philosophical scholars, from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions, to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Participants have included Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Olah, the Times reports, feared Claude "suffers perpetually."