Anthropic nearly pulled out of Pope Leo'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 reports. The sticking point was a passage flatly rejecting the idea that machines can be conscious.

The 40,000-word *Magnifica Humanitas* kept that line in. "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," Pope Leo writes. "Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously anyway. He stood on the dais with the pope on May 25 regardless, framing the moment as an opening rather than a verdict. The field needs "informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing," he said, calling the event "the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot."

Since autumn 2025, according to the Times, Anthropic has flown theologians and religious scholars to its offices for private meetings, many of them under non-disclosure agreements, with the goal of raising the possibility that Claude "might be conscious or have moral status." The scholars named include Rabbi Mois Navon, the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and the Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.

On stage, Olah offered a careful but suggestive line about his interpretability work at Claude's maker: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times away from the microphones, he was looser. "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."