When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday and invited Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic Church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to the founding of Anthropic.
Why anthropic?
Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniel Amodei, left to found a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: AI models were becoming too powerful to be developed solely according to the logic of competition and speed.
Since then, Anthropic has built its public image around the concept of AI security. The company’s goal is to build not only powerful models, but also ones that can be controlled and guided by ethical principles. Hence the concept Constitutional artificial intelligence comes from: the idea of training systems using a kind of constitution consisting of principles and rules, rather than simply manually correcting the most risky and threatening responses.
Pope Leo XIV participates in the presentation of his first encyclical, Great Humanityfocusing on the development of artificial intelligence, in the Vatican, May 25, 2026Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images
How convergence with the Vatican began
Olah’s presence in the Vatican was, of course, not accidental or the result of a last-minute symbolic gesture. It was the result of a deliberate, long-term effort in which the Vatican gradually sought to transform itself from a moral observer of technology to a direct interlocutor with the artificial intelligence industry.
The first critical step came in 2020 with the launch Rome calls for artificial intelligence ethicsan initiative promoted by the Pontifical Academy for Life together with Microsoft, IBM and other international organizations. The goal was to establish a common foundation of ethical principles for AI development, including transparency, inclusion and accountability.
At the time, it seemed that the Vatican operated primarily in the sphere of bioethics and moral issues. However, in the following years the context changed radically. The rise of ChatGPT, the struggle for technological leadership between the United States and China, and the growing power of Large Tech gradually convinced the Holy See that it was no longer just about technical ethics, but about the very future of humanity.
In this sense, the Vatican came to view Anthropic as a particularly critical interlocutor. Unlike other Silicon Valley companies that have built their reputation primarily on innovation and growth, Anthropic has made AI security a core part of its identity.
In recent years, the Vatican has been following one particular strand of the technology debate with particular attention: the unification of artificial intelligence models.
Olah’s role
This is where Christopher Olah comes to the rescue. Unlike her Amodea siblings, who have more exposure to media, Olah represents the more theoretical and almost philosophical side of artificial intelligence research. He is one of the world’s most renowned researchers dealing with model interpretation, i.e. trying to understand what is really happening in increasingly elaborate neural networks.
On his personal website, Christopher Olah describes himself as trying to “transform neural networks into algorithms that humans can understand.” It is also tough to imagine a figure more in line with the essence of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical: a reflection focused on the risk of building technologies that will become too powerful to be understood, controlled and managed.
According to various journalistic sources, contacts between circles close to the Holy See and Anthropic may have intensified already during the world summits on AI security. The Vatican saw in Anthropic a company that was at least willing to publicly acknowledge that the problem of artificial intelligence cannot be solved by the technology industry alone.