Anthropic Nearly Pulled Out of Pope Leo XIV's AI Encyclical

Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder, read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and, days before the May 25 Vatican rollout, proposed that Anthropic back out of the event, according to The New York Times. The sticking point was a passage declaring that "So-called 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."

The 40,000-word document, Magnifica Humanitas, kept that line. Olah appeared on the dais with the Pope anyway.

Behind the scenes, Anthropic had been working the question for months. Since fall 2025 the company has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under nondisclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, with participants including Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The NDAs were lifted over the summer, and the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after learning Olah had too.

Olah's own position is hedged. "We don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I'm genuinely uncertain," he told the Times. That uncertainty is doing a lot of work: it is the premise under which Anthropic's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the possibility of moral status seriously, while the final encyclical closed the door on it.