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When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, inviting Christopher Olah, one of the founders of Anthropic, to speak. This move signals an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic Church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we have to go back to the founding of Anthropic.
Why Anthropy?
Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: AI models have become too powerful to be developed exclusively according to the logic of competition and speed.
Since then, Anthropic has built its public image around the concept of AI safety. The company aims to build not only robust models, but also models that can be controlled and guided by ethical principles. This is where the concept comes in Constitutional artificial intelligence It comes from: the idea of training systems that use a kind of constitution consisting of principles and rules, rather than simply manually correcting the most severe and dangerous responses.
Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first encyclical. Wonderful humanityfocused on the rise of artificial intelligence, at the Vatican on May 25, 2026.Photography: Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images
How did the rapprochement with the Vatican begin?
Clearly, Olah’s presence in the Vatican was neither a coincidence, nor the result of a last-minute symbolic gesture. It was the result of a deliberate, long-term effort through which the Vatican gradually sought to transform itself from a moral observer of technology into a direct interlocutor with the AI industry.
The first major step in 2020 came with Rome calls for ethics in artificial intelligencean initiative promoted by the Pontifical Academy for Life in collaboration with Microsoft, IBM and other international organizations. The goal was to create a common foundation of ethical principles for AI development, including transparency, inclusion and accountability.
At the time, the Vatican seemed to be working primarily on bioethics and ethical issues. But in the years since, the context has changed dramatically. The rise of ChatGPT, the struggle for technological leadership between the United States and China, and the growing power of big technology companies have gradually convinced the Holy See that the issue is no longer just about the ethics of technology, but about the very future of humanity.
In this sense, the Vatican has come to view the anthropologist as a particularly important interlocutor. Unlike other Silicon Valley companies that have built their reputation primarily around innovation and growth, Anthropic has made AI safety a core part of its identity.
In recent years, the Vatican has followed a specific line of discussion related to technology with particular interest: the harmonization of artificial intelligence models.
Ola’s turn
This is where Christopher comes in first. Unlike the Amodei brothers, who are more exposed to the media, Ola represents the more theoretical and philosophically rounded side of AI research. He is one of the world’s best-known researchers on the subject of model interpretability, or the effort to understand what actually happens within increasingly complex neural networks.
On his personal website, Christopher Olah describes himself as someone trying to “turn neural networks into algorithms that are understandable to humans.” It is difficult to imagine a figure more attuned to the essence of Pope Leo
According to various journalistic sources, contacts between circles close to the Holy See and humanity may have intensified during the global summits on AI safety. The Vatican saw in Anthropic, at least, a company willing to publicly acknowledge that the AI problem could not be solved by the technology industry alone.
