Anthropic Lobbied Vatican to Soften Pope's AI Consciousness Line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to pull the company out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch at the Vatican in May, according to The New York Times, after an advance copy of the text rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.

The sticking point sat inside the 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo wrote that artificial intelligences "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," and that they have no moral conscience. Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously."

The final text did not shift.

Olah went on the dais anyway. From the Vatican lectern he said of Claude, "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." He added, "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment."

The outreach did not stop at the Vatican. 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 debate 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.