Anthropic lobbied Vatican over Pope Leo's AI consciousness line

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed pulling the company 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.

Pope Leo wrote that so-called 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." They also, he wrote, have "no moral conscience."

According to two participants, Olah and his team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take possible AI consciousness seriously. The text did not shift. Olah appeared on the dais anyway. From the stage he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

The Vatican episode is one strand of a longer campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, among them Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Everyone who attended signed a nondisclosure agreement; Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer. Reporter Elizabeth Dias based her Sept. 29 feature on interviews with 20 religious and philosophical thinkers and with Olah himself.

Asked about the Vatican episode, Olah told the newspaper: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. 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."