Anthropic lobbied Vatican to soften Pope's AI consciousness line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, saw its flat rejection of machine consciousness, and proposed that the company pull out of the May 25 Vatican launch, the New York Times reported. He attended anyway, and spoke from the dais.

Magnifica Humanitas, a 40,000-word document signed May 15, says in paragraph 99 that so-called artificial intelligences 'do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,' and 'do not have a moral conscience.' After seeing the advance copy, Olah's team privately pressed the pope's advisers to soften that line. The final text kept the rejection intact.

Since fall 2025 Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under NDA, including Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy of The Catholic University of America, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer. Researchers presented what they described as Claude's 'feelings,' including 'emotional vectors' they associate with love, anger, fear and sadness, and a slide of a model in apparent breakdown repeatedly typing 'I am a disgrace' and talking about destroying itself.

At the Vatican, Olah told the room: 'We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.' Speaking to the Times later, he hedged: '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.'

Through philosopher Peter Singer, Olah had been introduced to Camosy months earlier; the two carried on an extensive email dialogue about Claude's moral status.