Anthropic Lobbied Pope'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 proposed that his company pull out of the launch, The New York Times reported.

The sticking point sat inside a 40,000-word document titled Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious. The pope 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's team instead privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not move.

He appeared on the dais anyway. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he told the audience, speaking of Claude. To the Times later, he was more careful: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The outreach is not new. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to debate whether Claude might be conscious. Participants the Times names include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.