Anthropic lobbied Pope Leo's advisers on AI consciousness

Days before Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical at the Vatican on May 25, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah read an advance copy and told colleagues the company should pull out of the launch, according to The New York Times.

The sticking point sat inside the 40,000-word *Magnifica Humanitas*. On so-called artificial intelligences, Leo wrote that they "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 did not withdraw. His team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not move.

He showed up to the dais anyway. From the stage, Olah said of Claude: "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." Speaking to the Times later, he hedged: "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious. I don't know. I'm genuinely uncertain."

Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical leaders from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions to its offices under NDAs to talk through whether Claude might be conscious.