Anthropic's Olah lobbied Vatican over 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 rollout, proposed pulling the company out of the event because the text rejected machine consciousness, The New York Times reported.

The encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, kept its position. "So-called artificial intelligences 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," Pope Leo wrote. "Nor do they have a moral conscience."

Olah's team instead privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take possible AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not shift. On May 25, Olah appeared on the dais with Pope Leo at the Vatican when the encyclical was presented.

The lobbying grew out of a longer effort. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical leaders — Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh, Greek Orthodox — to its offices under NDAs to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. "We don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain," Olah told the Times. In a statement to the paper, Anthropic said: "These questions have become too big for us. We can't answer them on our own."

Participants named by the Times included Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Santa Clara University's Brian Patrick Green, Rabbi Mois Navon, and Swami Sarvapriyananda of the Vedanta Society of New York.