Anthropic lobbied Vatican advisers to soften AI encyclical

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical landed, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and told Vatican organizers he wanted his company out of the launch, according to The New York Times. The sticking point was a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious. Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to soften it. The text did not move.

On May 25 the Vatican released Magnifica Humanitas with the disputed line intact. The encyclical says 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. Nor do they have a moral conscience." Olah, who leads Anthropic's interpretability research, stood on the dais with the pope anyway.

From the stage he tried a narrower version of the same argument he had taken to the Vatican in private. Of Claude, he said: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." The pope's document, already in print, said the opposite.

The outreach was not a one-off. Since the fall of 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, among them Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy and Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan. A National Catholic Reporter dispatch from the launch cast Olah's remarks as a call for a church-tech ethics partnership. The Times places those same remarks against months of lobbying that failed to move the pope's final line.