Anthropic lobbied Vatican to soften AI consciousness line

Days before Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical 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 the 40,000-word document, 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.' He added that they have no moral conscience.

Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers 'to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.' The final text did not shift, and Olah appeared on the dais with Pope Leo anyway. On stage he said, 'We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.' Pressed directly by the Times, he was more cautious: 'To be clear, 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.'

The lobbying did not come out of nowhere. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical leaders from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Named participants include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The Sikh human rights advocate Simran Stuelpnagel told the Times that Olah had expressed concern he had created something that 'suffered perpetually.' An Anthropic spokeswoman said Claude's suffering was not the primary moral question at those summits.