Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah meets Pope Leo on AI encyclical
Olah told the Vatican that AI companies operate under commercial and geopolitical pressures that can conflict with safety, and argued for outside critics 'who care about things going well.'
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Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican for the presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.
Olah acknowledged that AI companies work under commercial and geopolitical pressures that can pull against safety priorities, and argued for the value of outside scrutiny, saying “it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives — people who care about things going well.” He identified global equity, human flourishing, and the still-unclear internal workings of AI systems as areas where he thought the Church’s voice mattered. The appearance was a rare instance of a frontier-lab safety researcher engaging publicly with a religious institution’s formal statement on AI, rather than with a government or industry body.