Anthropic nearly walked 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, according to The New York Times. His team privately lobbied papal advisers. They did not get what they wanted. The 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas kept its line that AI has 'no moral conscience.'

The passage Olah objected to was blunt. Pope Leo wrote that AI systems '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.'

Olah appeared on the dais anyway. From the stage, speaking about Claude, he said: 'We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.' Speaking to the Times later, he was more careful: 'we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain.'

The courting is not a one-off. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, with participants drawn from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions.