Anthropic Pressed Vatican to Soften Pope'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. The sticking point sat inside the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas: a passage denying that machines can have any inner life.

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," and that they have "no moral conscience."

Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The text kept its line. Olah appeared on the dais anyway.

At the Vatican lectern he said, "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times afterwards, 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 clash did not come out of nowhere. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Participants named by the Times include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Sikh activist Simran Stuelpnagel told the paper that Olah said he feared he had created something that "suffered perpetually."

Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer.