Anthropic Pressed Vatican to Soften Pope's AI Consciousness Line

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 of Magnifica Humanitas and proposed that the company skip the event, according to The New York Times. The sticking point was a passage rejecting the idea that machines can be conscious.

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to leave room for the possibility of AI consciousness. The final text did not shift. On "so-called artificial intelligences," Pope Leo wrote that machines "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," adding "nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah went to Rome anyway.

From the dais, he described Claude in a register the encyclical rejects: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." He also hedged in the same breath: "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 behind-the-scenes push is part of a wider Anthropic campaign. Since fall 2025, the company has flown religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to debate whether Claude might be conscious. The group has included Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.