Anthropic lobbied Vatican on AI consciousness, NYT finds

An Anthropic co-founder considered pulling the company out of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical launch after an advance copy ruled out the possibility that AI systems can be conscious. He stayed, and his team lobbied the pope's advisers privately. The text did not change.

That is the picture from a feature in The New York Times by Elizabeth Dias, reported out of San Francisco, the Vatican and Washington. Chris Olah read the passage ahead of the May 25 rollout at the Vatican, pitched his colleagues on skipping it, and appeared on the dais with Pope Leo anyway.

Pope Leo's 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is blunt. 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." The document adds: "Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah's version from the stage ran the other way. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he told the audience. "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment."

The lobbying sits inside a longer campaign. Since fall 2025 Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might have moral status, including Rabbi Mois Navon and the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy. The reporting lists traditions ranging from Christian, Jewish and Hindu to Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox.

The article does not name which Vatican advisers Anthropic approached, and the NDA sessions remain unpublished.