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, caught a passage ruling out machine consciousness, and proposed the company pull out of the launch, the New York Times reported.

The sticking point was a line in the 40,000-word *Magnifica Humanitas* 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 have "no moral conscience." Rather than walk, Olah's team privately lobbied the pope's advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously. The final text did not move.

Olah, who leads Anthropic's interpretability research, stood on the dais with Pope Leo anyway. In his remarks he said the field needs "informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing," and called the event "the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot."

The encyclical appearance was one surface of a quieter campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical scholars from Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Latter-day Saint, Sikh and Greek Orthodox traditions, including Rabbi Mois Navon and the Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, to its offices under non-disclosure agreements to discuss whether Claude might be conscious. Olah told reporter Elizabeth Dias, "we don't know if A.I. models are conscious."