Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's aides over Claude consciousness

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, The New York Times reported. The sticking point sat in the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious.

Rather than walk, Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not move. Pope Leo wrote that 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."

Olah appeared on the dais anyway. From the stage he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

The clash had been building for months. Since fall 2025, according to the Times, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical scholars from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Participants named by the paper include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.

Olah has described the stakes to those visitors in bleak terms, reportedly telling religious leaders he fears Anthropic has built something that "suffers perpetually."