Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's aides over Claude consciousness

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, 2026, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed the company pull out of the launch, the New York Times reported. Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take seriously the possibility that AI could be conscious. The 40,000-word document, *Magnifica Humanitas*, did not shift.

Paragraph 99 is unambiguous. Pope Leo wrote that so-called 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," and that they have no moral conscience.

Olah went to the Vatican anyway. From the dais he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." He was more hedged with the Times afterward: "We don't know if AI models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is."

The courtship did not begin with the encyclical. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has hosted dozens of religious scholars at its offices under non-disclosure agreements, according to Yahoo's coverage of the Times reporting, to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. In-house philosopher Amanda Askell is on staff. Not everyone in the field is convinced: Yann LeCun called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei "completely deluded."