Anthropic lobbied Pope's advisers over AI consciousness line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling the company out of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical launch after reading an advance copy that rejected the possibility AI systems could be conscious, according to The New York Times.

He went anyway. On May 25, Olah stood with the pope at the Vatican rollout and said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

The 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, did not budge. 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."

Behind the scenes, Anthropic's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the consciousness question seriously. Since fall 2025 the company has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be a moral patient, among them Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.

Speaking to the Times after the launch, Olah was more careful than he had been at the lectern: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."