Anthropic lobbied Vatican over Pope Leo's AI consciousness

Days before Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling the company out of the launch, The New York Times reported. The sticking point sat inside a 40,000-word document called Magnifica Humanitas: a passage saying AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain."

Olah's team did not withdraw. Instead, they privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not shift. The encyclical also says 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 the dais with the pope anyway. At the Vatican lectern he told the audience that Anthropic researchers "find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

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