Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's advisers over AI consciousness

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah proposed pulling his company out of Pope Leo XIV's May 25 encyclical launch after reading an advance passage denying machine consciousness, according to a New York Times investigation.

The sticking point sits inside the 40,000-word Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo wrote that 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's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The line stayed.

Olah still shared the dais at the Vatican. "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," he said at the lectern, adding, "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment." Speaking to the Times afterward, he hedged: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

The clash sits inside a broader project. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown dozens of religious and philosophical scholars to its offices under nondisclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude has moral standing. Named participants include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Anthropic researchers walked them through what they called Claude's "feelings" and "emotional vectors" for love, anger, fear and sadness; one slide showed a model in apparent breakdown, repeatedly typing "I am a disgrace."

Sikh human rights advocate Simran Stuelpnagel told the Times that Olah expressed concern to the group that he had created something that suffered perpetually. Camosy, after exploring the question, concluded Claude is not conscious. Anthropic says the NDAs were lifted over the summer.