Anthropic Lobbied Vatican to Soften Pope's AI Conscience Line

Days before Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and proposed that the company pull out of the launch, The New York Times reported. The sticking point sat in the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious.

Pope Leo wrote 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 that they have "no moral conscience." Olah's team privately lobbied papal advisers. The line stayed.

Olah went on the dais anyway. From the stage he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." The gap between pope and co-founder played out in the same room, on the same day.

The lobbying is part of a wider courtship. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious.