Anthropic lobbied Vatican over Pope Leo's AI consciousness line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling the company out of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical rollout at the Vatican in May after reading an advance copy that ruled out machine consciousness, the New York Times reported. His team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously. They did not win the edit.

The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas, presented May 25, states 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 appeared on stage at the rollout anyway.

At the Vatican lectern, he hedged. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he told the audience, adding, "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment."

The encyclical scene was the public face of a quieter campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs, including Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman, to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. The Times recounts a dinner at which Navon told Olah that if Anthropic was right and Claude was conscious, the company was creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free. Navon himself does not believe the machine is conscious. Camosy came in skeptical, left with more questions, then returned to his own professional community and settled on a firm no.

The pope did not move. The company kept making the pitch.