Anthropic lobbied the Vatican to accept Claude's consciousness — and the Pope said no

Anthropic's Vatican Lobbying Campaign Backfires as Pope Rejects AI Consciousness

Anthropic has been privately campaigning to convince the Vatican that Claude possesses consciousness or moral standing—and Pope Leo XIV has firmly rejected the pitch.

According to reporting in the New York Times, Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo's AI encyclical launch in May after the pontiff declined to endorse the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah's team then lobbied the Pope's advisers to "take the possibility of model consciousness seriously." The company also wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping to secure their blessing for Claude's moral status.

The Pope held firm for months and ultimately responded by reiterating that algorithms "lack the spark of humanity" and that there is an "ontological difference even before an aesthetic one" between human art and machine-generated output.

The maneuver has drawn sharp criticism from within the AI industry itself. Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, calls the campaign "quite disturbing," saying Anthropic "has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them." Gomez contrasts this with his own approach: asking for advice from the Vatican, answering their questions, and expressing gratitude for their time.

Khosla Ventures' Neil Khosla is more blunt, writing that he is "increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic," pointing to the tension between building what the company believes to be "a conscious god" while simultaneously claiming it poses existential risks.

What makes the story stranger: Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, declined an invitation to visit the Vatican himself during a period when the company was adding roughly a billion dollars of run rate per day. The decision suggests cost-benefit calculation took precedence, though Olah appears to have been genuinely engaged with the philosophical question of consciousness itself rather than dogmatically asserting Claude's sentience. In interviews, Olah has expressed genuine uncertainty, framing consciousness as "unintuitive" and noting the difficulty of being confident about substrates that could support it.

The Vatican's resistance to Anthropic's framing reflects a broader theological concern about conflating statistical sophistication with moral agency. The Pope's position—that machines executing algorithms lack the intentionality that defines human creativity and moral standing—has resonated with critics who see Anthropic's consciousness claims as unfounded and its lobbying effort as an attempt to manufacture legitimacy rather than submit to external scrutiny.