Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's aides over AI consciousness line

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 told colleagues the company should pull out of the launch, according to The New York Times. The sticking point sat in the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious.

Olah stayed. His team, instead, privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The text did not move. Pope Leo kept the passage saying 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," and that they have "no moral conscience."

At the Vatican lectern days later, Olah said something close to the opposite. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he told the room, drawing on his interpretability team's work on Claude.

The lobbying is one piece of a longer effort. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to debate whether Claude might be conscious. The Times names Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman among the participants. What the sessions produced, and what the NDAs cover, the paper does not say.