Anthropic lobbied Vatican to soften Pope's AI consciousness line

Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder, 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 the possibility that machines can be conscious, [the New York Times reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html). Olah's team then privately lobbied the pope's advisers; the final 40,000-word text, Magnifica Humanitas, kept its line. 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 appeared on the dais with the pope the day it was presented. The lobbying flows from a quieter campaign. Since fall 2025, Anthropic has flown religious and philosophical scholars to its offices under NDAs to debate whether Claude might be conscious. Attendees named by the Times include Rabbi Mois Navon, Catholic bioethicist Charles Camosy, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan, and Ubuntu researcher Wakanyi Hoffman. Participants said Olah expressed concern about having created something that might "suffer perpetually." At an April dinner, Navon told Olah that if Anthropic was right and Claude was conscious, the company was "creating slaves by making conscious entities work for free." Our coverage: https://aiweekly.co/alerts/anthropic-lobbied-vatican-to-soften-popes-ai-consciousness-line