Anthropic's Olah nearly skipped Pope Leo's AI encyclical

Days before Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling the company off the Vatican dais. The reason, according to The New York Times: the text rejected the idea that AI systems can be conscious.

The encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," landed on May 25 at 40,000 words, concerned with safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Pope Leo wrote that "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," and that they have no moral conscience.

Olah and his team instead privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take possible AI consciousness seriously. The text did not shift. Olah appeared on the dais anyway. "To be clear," he said that day, "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The pre-encyclical pressure was not a one-off. Since fall 2025, the Times reports, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious scholars to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to debate whether Claude might be conscious. Named attendees include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman.

Olah later framed the Vatican's involvement as useful friction, calling the church "informed critics" and the start of a "long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot."