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When Pope Leo XIV presented its first artificial intelligence document at the Vatican on Monday, inviting Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, to speak. The move marked an unprecedented partnership between the Catholic Church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this collaboration began, we must go back to the Anthropic beginning.
Why Anthropic?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to create a competing lab. He did so with a clear sense of satisfaction: The types of artificial intelligence were too powerful to be developed according to the logic of competition and speed.
Since then, Anthropic has built its public image on AI security concepts. The company aims to create not only strong models, but ones that are governed and guided by ethical principles. This is where the idea of Constitutional AI comes from: the idea of training systems using a type of rules made of principles and rules, instead of manually preparing dangerous and dangerous solutions.
Pope Leo XIV goes so far as to issue his first Encyclical Letter, A Successful Personfocused on the rise of artificial intelligence, at the Vatican on May 25, 2026.Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/Getty Images
How the Agreement with the Vatican Began
Olah’s presence in the Vatican was apparently no accident, nor the result of a last-minute symbolic gesture. It was the result of a deliberate, long-term effort by the Vatican to gradually transform itself from a technical culture into a direct contact with the AI industry.
The first big part came in 2020 and Rome Calls for AI Ethicsa project promoted by the Pontifical Academy for Life together with Microsoft, IBM, and other international organizations. The goal was to establish a shared foundation of ethical principles for AI development, including transparency, inclusion, and accountability.
At that time, the Vatican seemed to be working mainly in the field of moral principles. However, in the years that followed, things changed dramatically. The rise of ChatGPT, the struggle for technological leadership between the United States and China, and the growing power of Big Tech gradually convinced the Holy See that the issue was no longer about technology, but about the future of humanity.
In this sense, Anthropic has been seen by the Vatican as a very important guide. Unlike other Silicon Valley companies that have built their reputation primarily on innovation and growth, Anthropic has made AI security a central part of its strategy.
In recent years, the Vatican has pursued only one method of technological communication with great interest: the communication of AI models.
The position of Olah
This is where Christopher Olah comes in. Unlike the Amodei brothers, who are more visible in the media, Olah represents a more nuanced and almost philosophical side of AI research. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on the topic of model interpretation, or the effort to understand what happens inside a complex neural network.
On his website, Christopher Olah describes himself as someone who is trying to “turn neural networks into algorithms that make sense to people.” And it is difficult to think of a person who is more in line with the principle of Pope Leo XIV: a picture based on the risk of construction technologies that are too powerful to be understood, controlled, or controlled.
According to various media sources, the communication between the circles close to the Holy See and Anthropic may have been intensified during the international conference on the protection of AI. The Vatican saw in Anthropic a company that wants to openly admit that the problem of artificial intelligence cannot be solved by technology companies alone.
