Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) on X

Chris Olah, an Anthropic co-founder, threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch in May over a fundamental disagreement about machine consciousness. The pope rejected the premise that AI systems can be conscious, which apparently crossed a line for Olah. After the initial confrontation, Anthropic's team pivoted to a lobbying strategy, privately approaching the pope's advisers to pressure them into "taking the possibility of model consciousness seriously." The pope didn't budge. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been running a sustained campaign to get religious and theological legitimacy for the idea that Claude—their AI system—has moral standing. They've brought in theologians and religious scholars, wined and dined them, and locked them under NDAs. The goal was transparent: get these respected voices to endorse the notion that their AI deserves moral consideration. The whole thing reads like a high-stakes influence operation aimed at a religious institution. Anthropic wanted papal blessing for a claim about their technology that remains deeply contested even among AI researchers. When direct pressure didn't work, they shifted to a softer approach through intermediaries. Whether the pope's resistance held or whether this eventually swayed Vatican thinking isn't entirely clear from what's here, but the effort itself reveals how far Anthropic is willing to go to establish Claude's moral status in the eyes of influential institutions.