NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times,...
Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale
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Oct 02, 2026
~2 min read
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NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-anthropi…
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-anthropi…
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Olah at the Vatican on May 25: AI models “are made from us, from our words.” He likened his work to “bringing a fictional character to life.”
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Pope Leo XIV at the encyclical launch on May 25: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
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I do not think Olah is a bad man. He has acted in good faith, and I have credited him for engaging the Church while much of his industry sneered at the encyclical. But the ask shows how little Silicon Valley understands the Church, or religion at all.
Last fall I wrote that the industry’s original sin is a refusal to recognize any authority greater than itself, a temptation as old as Genesis: to be like God. Ten months later, that temptation is alive inside one of the more thoughtful labs in the business.
In professional settings, I have spoken with the people who work in the religious outreach efforts at the frontier labs (some call them philosophy teams, others describe their work as the philosophical underpinnings of the models), and at times I have come away unimpressed.
Few of them know Catholicism well. In one crude example, a man I met in person at a coffee shop (not a Michelin star restaurant!) who was a key contact for the Catholic community did not know what an encyclical was. He could not pronounce the word, and he kept calling the pope Leo XII.
There is a lot of work to do here. thelettersfromleo.com/p/tech-billion…
Last fall I wrote that the industry’s original sin is a refusal to recognize any authority greater than itself, a temptation as old as Genesis: to be like God. Ten months later, that temptation is alive inside one of the more thoughtful labs in the business.
In professional settings, I have spoken with the people who work in the religious outreach efforts at the frontier labs (some call them philosophy teams, others describe their work as the philosophical underpinnings of the models), and at times I have come away unimpressed.
Few of them know Catholicism well. In one crude example, a man I met in person at a coffee shop (not a Michelin star restaurant!) who was a key contact for the Catholic community did not know what an encyclical was. He could not pronounce the word, and he kept calling the pope Leo XII.
There is a lot of work to do here. thelettersfromleo.com/p/tech-billion…
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It’s striking that Olah was so obsessed with the Catholic Church’s position on consciousness, because Pope Leo XIV barely addresses it in Magnifica Humanitas. The encyclical uses “conscience” 22 times and “consciousness” once, and that lone mention has nothing to do with machines.
Many in Silicon Valley treat the two terms as interchangeable. Catholic theology keeps them far apart: conscience is the inner voice that judges good and evil, and the pope says AI has none.
Many in Silicon Valley treat the two terms as interchangeable. Catholic theology keeps them far apart: conscience is the inner voice that judges good and evil, and the pope says AI has none.