Anthropic Lobbied Vatican to Soften Pope's AI Encyclical

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah 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.

The sticking point sat in the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas. The text held 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."

Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. The text did not change.

He appeared on the dais anyway on May 25. From the lectern he described Claude in nearly the opposite terms the document had just used: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease."

Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Among them: Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.