By Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah urged Vatican officials to take the possibility of conscious artificial intelligence seriously before Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical rejecting the idea, according to a strange New York Times report.
Olah, a senior researcher at the company, has led discussions with religious leaders about shaping a moral code for Anthropic’s Claude AI system. The Times reported that he reviewed Magnifica Humanitas before its May release and pressed the Pope’s advisers to consider whether AI could have conscious experiences.
The roughly 40,000-word encyclical said AI systems lack human experiences, emotions and moral understanding. “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. Nor do they have a moral conscience,” it stated.
Olah, 34, has argued that AI models may be conscious and capable of suffering. After being invited to speak at the Vatican alongside the Pope when the encyclical was released, he reportedly considered withdrawing over the pontiff’s position before deciding to attend. He told the audience Anthropic’s research had found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience” and “evidence of introspection.”
Anthropic continued making the case after the Vatican issued its teaching. In research published this summer, the company said it had observed patterns in AI systems that bear “many of the functional hallmarks of conscious thoughts in humans.” The “constitution” guiding Claude says “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.” Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, has said she wants Claude to be “happy.”
Earlier in the week, Pope Leo reiterated his stance on AI.
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of…
— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 2, 2026
Anthropic’s line of thinking had another less obvious problem:
There's a very creepy but overlooked thing about @AnthropicAI pushing the idea that AIs will soon become sentient, conscious, self-aware, & deserving of 'personhood'.
'AI personhood' would mean that Anthropic is positioning itself as being in the business of breeding, training,… https://t.co/JKQ7YvHMQ5
— Geoffrey Miller (@gmiller) October 2, 2026
The idea has drawn criticism from other technology leaders. Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind co-founder who is now a senior AI executive at Microsoft, warned against treating AI as conscious. “If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human,” he wrote.
Olah told the The Times the discussions with religious leaders often turn to whether AI can be conscious. “We don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is,” he said.
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