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

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TL;DR

  • Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling out of the May 25 Vatican launch after reading the encyclical in advance.
  • Pope Leo XIV's 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas kept its line that AI has 'no moral conscience' despite private lobbying by Anthropic.
  • Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars under NDAs to debate whether Claude might be conscious.

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, according to The New York Times.

The sticking point sat in the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas: a passage rejecting the possibility that machines can be conscious. On 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's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The text did not move.

Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. The Times named Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman among the participants.

Olah, who leads Anthropic's interpretability research, appeared on the dais anyway.

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Originally reported by The New York Times

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Original headline: NYT: Anthropic Nearly Walked Out on Pope Leo XIV’s AI Encyclical — Then Lobbied His Advisers