Anthropic lobbied Vatican to soften Pope Leo's AI encyclical

Days before Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed that the company pull out of the launch, The New York Times reported. He had read an advance copy of the 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, and did not like what it said about machines.

Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. It did not change the text. The encyclical holds that 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." And: machines have "no moral conscience."

Olah went to Rome anyway. From the Vatican stage he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

The encyclical fight was not Anthropic's first attempt at the question. Since fall 2025 the company has flown religious scholars — among them Rabbi Mois Navon and the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy — to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. The NDAs were lifted over the summer. According to the Times, the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after they learned Olah had too.