Anthropic nearly skipped Pope Leo's AI encyclical rollout

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling the company out of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical launch at the Vatican days before the May 25 presentation, after reading an advance copy that rejected the possibility that AI systems can be conscious, The New York Times reported. His team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. The text did not change.

The 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, says AI systems "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," and that machines "do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah appeared on the dais anyway. At the Vatican lectern he told the audience, "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," adding, "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment."

Since fall 2025, the lab has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs, among them Rabbi Mois Navon, an Orthodox scholar from Israel and former computer engineer whose dissertation covered the ethics of machine consciousness, and the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy. Navon concluded at an April dinner that the Anthropic team were relating to Claude like a conscious being. "Anthropic's lobbying did not change the text" of the encyclical, the Times reports.