Anthropic Lobbied Pope's Advisers to Soften AI Encyclical

Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical days before its May 25 Vatican launch and proposed that the company pull out of the event. The sticking point was a passage rejecting the possibility that AI systems can be conscious. Anthropic stayed in the room, and Olah's team instead lobbied the pope's advisers to soften the line, according to The New York Times, which spoke with two participants.

The lobbying did not change the text. The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas kept its judgment that AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," and that machines "do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah appeared on stage with the pope anyway. At the lectern he held to Anthropic's house line on model welfare, telling the room: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times afterward he was more hedged. "To be clear, we don't know if A.I. models are conscious," he said. "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 Vatican episode sits on top of a longer campaign. Since fall 2025 Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under nondisclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious or have moral status; the NDAs were lifted over the summer. Participants named by the Times include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Not all of them left persuaded. At a dinner with Olah in April, Navon argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude was conscious, the company was creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free. Camosy told the paper he came away a firm "no" on whether AI models are conscious.