Report says Anthropic's co-founder proposed pulling out of the pope's AI encyclical launch

The New York Times reported on September 29 that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to the Vatican launch of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25. After reading an advance copy, he reportedly suggested Anthropic withdraw from the event, because the text rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah and his team then privately asked the pope's advisers to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously, but the final text did not change. Paragraph 99 says AI systems do not undergo experiences and do not feel joy or pain.

Olah attended anyway and said, "We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease." The report says Anthropic has met privately since autumn 2025 with some 20 theologians and religious scholars about whether Claude might have moral status, many of those meetings under nondisclosure agreements. A summary post by Christopher Hale passed 4.1 million views on October 2 and spread the story again. The articles we checked contain no official Anthropic statement.