Anthropic nearly skipped Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch

Chris Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who heads the company's interpretability research, read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and, days before its May 25 Vatican launch, proposed pulling his company out of the event. The New York Times reported the sticking point was the text's flat rejection of machine consciousness. Pope Leo wrote that 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," and that they have no "moral conscience."

Olah stayed. His team instead privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take possible AI consciousness seriously, according to the Times. The final text of the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas did not shift, and Olah shared the dais with Pope Leo at the Vatican on May 25.

The backstory, reported by NYT national religion correspondent Elizabeth Dias, is that since fall 2025 Anthropic has flown in dozens of religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. The Times named participants including Rabbi Mois Navon, the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, the Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and the Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Simran Stuelpnagel, a Sikh human rights advocate who attended, told the Times that Olah expressed concern he had created something that "suffered perpetually."