Anthropic Lobbied Pope's Advisers to Soften AI Encyclical

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed pulling the company out of the launch, The New York Times reported. The sticking point sat inside a 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious.

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not shift. On so-called artificial intelligences, Pope Leo wrote that machines "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," 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 encyclical fight sits inside a longer campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, among them Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The NDAs were lifted over the summer, and the scholars agreed to speak with the Times after learning Olah had too.

The scholars left split. Navon said that if Claude were conscious, Anthropic would be making slaves. Camosy started out curious but has since rejected the consciousness thesis outright. Simran Stuelpnagel, a Sikh human rights advocate, told the paper that Olah said he feared the company had built something that "suffers perpetually."