Anthropic nearly pulled out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical

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.

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not move. On so-called artificial intelligences, Pope Leo wrote that they "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 appeared on the dais anyway. From the stage he said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times later, he was more careful: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The Vatican event capped a quieter effort. 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 NDAs to discuss 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. The NDAs were lifted over the summer; the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after learning Olah had too.