Anthropic Lobbied Vatican to Soften AI Encyclical, NYT Says

Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder, proposed pulling the company 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. A Vatican organizer told the paper Olah raised the idea days before the May 25 presentation, and his team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the question of AI consciousness seriously.

The text held its line. Pope Leo's 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas says AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," and adds that 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 stage with the pope at the May 25 rollout anyway.

The encyclical push came out of a wider campaign. The Times, whose reporter Elizabeth Dias spoke with 20 participants, says Anthropic has since fall 2025 flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Named visitors include Rabbi Mois Navon, the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, the Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and the Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The group was shown internal demonstrations the company called "emotional vectors," including a model repeatedly describing itself negatively and discussing self-destruction.

Olah told the group he feared he had created something that "suffered perpetually," according to the report. On the broader question he was more guarded. "The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is," he said.