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 its May 25 Vatican launch, proposed pulling the company out of the event. The sticking point was the text's rejection of machine consciousness. He went anyway. According to a feature by Elizabeth Dias in The New York Times, his team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The 40,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, kept its position.

At the Vatican lectern Olah stayed close to the lab's house line on model welfare. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he said.

Speaking to the Times later, he was more hedged. "To be clear," Olah said, "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."

The Vatican episode sits inside a longer, quieter 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. Participants named by the Times include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. The NDAs were lifted over the summer; the scholars agreed to speak publicly only after learning Olah had too. Olah reportedly told them he feared the company had built something that "suffers perpetually."

The encyclical was signed May 15 and presented by Pope Leo himself at the Vatican on May 25, with Olah on the dais. Anthropic's lobbying of the drafters did not shift the final text.