Anthropic lobbied Vatican over Pope's AI consciousness line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed that the company pull out of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical launch at the Vatican in May after reading an advance copy that rejected the possibility that AI systems can be conscious, The New York Times reported. Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers; the 40,000-word *Magnifica Humanitas* kept its line that AI has no moral conscience anyway. Olah went to Rome and spoke from the dais. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he said.

The encyclical itself was blunt. Pope Leo wrote 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." Nor, he added, do they have a moral conscience.

The Vatican episode sits inside a longer program. Since fall 2025 Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious and how the model should behave. Roughly 20 thinkers have taken part, convened by Olah. The Times names Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman among the participants.

The reporting is single-sourced to the Times feature published September 29, and the paper does not quote any of the papal advisers Olah's team approached.