Anthropic pressed Vatican to soften AI consciousness line

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and, days before the May 25 Vatican launch, proposed pulling the company out of the event, according to The New York Times. The sticking point was the text's rejection of machine consciousness.

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, kept its line. Paragraph 99 states that artificial intelligences 'do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,' nor 'do they have a moral conscience.' Olah appeared on the dais at the Vatican anyway on May 25.

Reporter Elizabeth Dias also spoke with 20 participants in a separate, mostly unseen effort. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, with every attendee signing an NDA. Named participants include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer.

Inside the sessions, Olah treated Claude as a potentially sentient being and asked guests to help give it a moral education. Simran Stuelpnagel, a Sikh human rights advocate, said Olah expressed concern that he had 'created something that suffered perpetually.' Anthropic researchers presented what they described as Claude's 'feelings,' including 'emotional vectors' they associate with love, anger, fear and sadness; a slide shown regularly depicted a model in apparent breakdown, repeatedly typing 'I am a disgrace' and talking about destroying itself.

At a dinner in April, Rabbi Navon argued that if Anthropic was right and Claude was conscious, the company was creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free.

Speaking to the Times, Olah was more hedged: 'To be clear, 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.'