Anthropic nearly walked out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and, days before its May 25 Vatican rollout, proposed pulling the company out of the event because the text rejected machine consciousness, The New York Times reported.

The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas does not hedge. "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 wrote. "Nor do they have a moral conscience."

According to two participants, Olah and his team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take possible AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not shift. Olah ultimately appeared on the dais with Pope Leo at the Vatican on May 25 when the encyclical was presented.

The episode is one thread of a larger program. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements 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. The NDAs were lifted over the summer, and the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after learning Olah had too.

Simran Stuelpnagel, a Sikh human rights advocate who attended, told the Times that Olah expressed concern to the group that he had created something that suffered perpetually. Asked about the Vatican episode, Olah told the newspaper: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is."